


Great Wars Like Ours

by rilla



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Canon-Typical Alcoholism, Falling In Love, Inspired by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, M/M, Post-War, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:28:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 41,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26858995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rilla/pseuds/rilla
Summary: An Eternal Sunshine AU: Lewis Nixon wakes up on a completely normal November day, and decides to go to the beach.
Relationships: Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
Comments: 22
Kudos: 35





	Great Wars Like Ours

**Author's Note:**

> The title and the quote are both from One Last Poem for Richard by Sandra Cisneros. This fic was an absolute blast to write. Thank you so much to everyone who has been so encouraging about it! just a warning: this fic contains a brief mention of domestic abuse (not between the main characters), canon alcoholism, and mentions of canon deaths. also, there may be a few timeline idiosyncracies, but I tried!

‘I forget the reason, but I loved you once,  
remember?’

**_today_ **

It was just another goddamned day, like yesterday, like the day before that. Lew woke up and his head hurt, although not as much as it usually did. He stared at the ceiling, at the white whorls in the paint and the slant of sunlight from the gap between the drapes, and when he was almost too late, he got himself out of bed. The shower took an age to warm up, and he had forgotten to hang his towel up, so it felt damp and smelled musty from the day before. He had no food for breakfast, so he stood at the counter and paged through the newspaper without taking in a word as his coffee brewed. Out of habit, he added a splash of whisky, to start the day off right. 

He felt better after that, but only barely. It was already a quarter after nine, which meant he was late for work without having even left the house yet. He had lived in Nixon itself for some time close to the works, but then he had moved out to the sticks for no reason that he could recall, so the drive to work felt long and redundant. When he took in his surroundings it was hard to make himself feel any way at all about them. There was a hell of a lot of grass, and part of him thought that perhaps it should make him feel peaceful, but he had never been good at serenity. He rolled down his car window a few inches and winced away from the cold wind as he tipped his cigarette ash out onto the half-frozen road. November was a shitty fucking month and always had been, dark and miserable: he felt more than thought the words, _Least I’m not in Bastogne,_ and then had a sudden unpleasant rush of foxholes and exploding trees and 3am treks with his boots crunching over endless snow. He had thought then that he would never be warm again, but then there had been Austria and – and –

He frowned. There had been Austria, the sun hanging high in the sky, and a lake, its surface like rippling grey glass. The water cold on his skin – he remembered being in the lake fully clothed and for the life of him had no idea how that had happened. Whisky, probably. He fished one-handed in the passenger footwell for a scarf he had glimpsed when he had got into the car. It was checked, green and grey, and when he twisted it around his neck he felt acutely sad and heavy. Maybe he didn’t need a scarf today after all. He threw it back down onto the floor of the car and put his foot down. 

The thought of going to work was starting to settle in his stomach like lead. The idea of setting foot inside his office was unbearable, the papers on his desk, the gritty coffee, the men on the factory floor who knew for a fact that he barely had a job to do and who were polite to him only because they knew vaguely that he had done something in the war that was worthy of respect. (Had he?) The hours, stretching out and interminable. He had to show his face there every so often so that he didn’t feel so bad about the big paycheck he brought home every month. And because—

And because of what, exactly? He frowned at the road stretching out ahead of him. It seemed as though everything was grey, the sky and the ground and even the fields. It was Christmas next month and he felt even worse at the thought of spending it with his family. Since his mother had died, it would have to be Stanhope and Blanche, but the cook would be off for Christmas day and so he and Blanche would have to cobble together some unappetising meal, smoking over steaming pots together and wondering how to make their potatoes less soggy and why it took so long to roast a simple piece of meat. Maybe he could stay home and feign illness: he had some idea that was what he’d done last year, drank so much he had barely any recollection of the day at all. For a second he wrestled with the idea of visiting Kathy and Michael – surely she’d have to allow her son’s father to take a place around her Christmas table? – but even thinking about it was so exhausting that he dismissed it immediately. It wasn’t as though Michael would care either way that he was there, which was one of the few shitty things in Lew’s life that he felt no bitterness about, and only a sad sort of understanding.

He was coming up to the turning to Nixon in a few minutes. Part of him wanted to wheel around and go back home again – the empty melancholy in his gut told him that he’d feel better if he lay in bed for a few hours or maybe a few days – but he felt an odd compulsion to keep driving. It wasn’t entirely guilt and it certainly wasn’t necessity: he had nothing planned that day and it would be another few hours of pretending to listen when his secretary Mary spoke to him, and rearranging his papers when he left to make it look as though he’d done something. The sideroad came, he braked a little to turn—

And then he found himself not turning. He sped up again, feeling a sliver of that heaviness lift up off his shoulders. What did it matter? What did it matter, if he kept going? What did it matter if he didn’t make it into work? What did it matter if he went somewhere else entirely?

He lit another cigarette, feeling jubilant in a way he didn’t recognise having felt in a good long while, and floored it. 

*

He found himself in a place called Spring Lake. He had the feeling that he had been here before, perhaps as a child: it was familiar to him in a way that felt as though he had seen it in a dream. He had driven aimlessly for a while before seeing signs pointing towards it, and he’d thought, _That sounds nice._ What could go wrong when you combined spring and a lake? _Austria_ , he thought, although nothing had specifically gone wrong there unless you counted Grant getting shot, and Janovec getting killed, and Shifty’s accident—

It was so long ago. So long ago. He parked up and got out of his car, leaning against it as he surveyed the town. A road full of big beautiful houses that would have pleased his mom, overlooking the ocean. A smaller row of stores, mostly closed up for the winter. The beach itself was long and narrow and empty, the sand yellow and interspersed with green clumps of grass and weeds. The smell of the salt was intoxicating, fresh and enriching. He let his eyes close for a second and inhaled deeply. It made him feel peaceful, which was not a common thing.

When he opened his eyes again the beach was no longer empty. There was a solitary figure winding its way down the shore. A man, as far as he could tell, in a dark overcoat wrapped tightly around himself to shut out the almost-winter chill. His copper-coloured hair was the brightest thing in sight. Lew was glad that he wasn’t the only guy around here crazy enough to go to the beach for no reason on this random cold Friday, but he wasn’t glad enough to stick around outside in the biting wind for much longer.

There was a diner at the end of the row of stores, deserted except for an older couple sitting towards the back, the old grey-haired lady cutting up her sandwich slowly and deliberately and her husband draining a cup of coffee. In the door there was a sign saying ‘Under New Management’; maybe that had chased the old customers away, but he didn’t give much of a damn. Lew ordered coffee for himself, and pancakes and potatoes and bacon. He took a seat by the window, all the better to watch the water, and wished that he’d had the foresight to bring a book. He considered writing in his appointment book but at some point he’d taken it upon himself to tear out so many of the pages that there wasn’t much paper left in there. The food came quickly, nothing special, but it was hot and plentiful, with a little metal jug of syrup that he poured over everything on his plate. 

He had more of an appetite than he’d had for – he wasn’t sure how long, and the thought of it surprised him, but he didn’t think he’d been this hungry in weeks, maybe even months. He retrieved a newspaper that somebody else had left behind on the counter and flipped through it for the book reviews and the arts. Maybe he’d go to the city soon and take in a play – perhaps he could ignore Christmas entirely and take Blanche out to a nice lunch somewhere before a matinee instead, and celebrate that way. The thought of that made his spirits rise further, and he found himself packing his food away easily and efficiently, in a way he felt he hadn’t in a while. 

The door opened with a flurry of cold, and it took him a moment to recognise the figure that he’d seen on the beach. There was that dark overcoat and that blazing hair, but the voice didn’t match the hair, or his broad shoulders; rather he spoke so quietly to the hostess that Lew couldn’t hear a thing, and then he took a seat across the diner. Unlike Lew he’d remembered to bring a book, and read quietly until his food arrived, a bowl of soup and a sandwich. Across the room, the older couple paid up and left. Lew chased the dregs of syrup around his plate with his very last bite of pancake, and gestured for a coffee refill. This time, once the server had turned her back, he added in a slug from his flask, just to keep things exciting. From across the room, the guy was looking at him, his mouth drawn and almost disapproving behind an expression of careful blankness. Lew offered him his most charming smile, and the guy shook his head a little and ate a spoonful of soup to hide his own tiny half-smile that Lew could only just see.

Outside the wind had started to blow. The water was churning up, and the sky was heavy with cloud. The smell of salt had gotten even stronger and the hostess shivered as she went briskly around the room to shut the windows. The guy’s gaze was following her, thoughtful and watchful like he was sizing the situation up. Before his brain had cottoned on to what his body was doing, Lew found himself on his feet and headed across the room to the other table; he seated himself opposite the guy, stuck out a hand, and said, “Lewis Nixon.”

The guy looked at him, measured and thoughtful, and patted his mouth with his napkin before taking Lew’s hand. His grip was warm and dry. “Dick Winters. Have we met?”

“Nope,” Lew said. “But I finished my newspaper, and if it starts storming out there, I get the feeling that neither of us are going to want to leave this place for a while, so I decided to come on over and say hi. So: hi.”

“Hi,” Dick Winters said. Lew could detect some dry humour in his voice, deep down below that syllable. “Food’s good here, huh?”

“It was excellent,” Lew agreed brightly. “I’ve never been here before, but I was impressed. Although I was also extremely hungry, and sometimes those things get mixed up.”

That earned him a little laugh. “So what are you doing here?” Dick asked. 

“I had a day off work,” Lew lied, “so I decided to explore. What about you?”

Dick looked sheepish. “I, uh – I called in sick.”

“You don’t look sick to me.”

“Well, I’m not.” The corner of Dick’s mouth raised in a self-effacing half-smile. “Believe me, I’m not the sort of person who would usually do something like this.”

“I do believe you,” Lew said. He really did. “Is it worth it?”

Dick considered the question, looking out of the window at the water and the sand. “You know, I think it is.” 

Dick turned out to be an easy sort of person to talk to. He had grown up in Lancaster County, which Lew had never heard of – “Really? Never?” Dick said, sounding sceptical, and Lew said, “Jesus Christ, I’ve never sat down to memorise all the tiny towns across the east coast,” and then Dick told him the population of Lancaster County, and Lew conceded that fine, perhaps he should have heard of it before. Lew told him about growing up in New York and shipping out to California for school, and the years he’d spent at Yale. Dick had him beat, though – he’d actually finished his degree. “And then I went into the army,” Dick added. “Thought I’d get it out of the way, and then the war happened.”

“The war?” Lew asked, and Dick looked at him hard and said, “Yeah, the paratroops,” and Lew felt as though his stomach was about to fall out.

“The paratroops? No way. Me too.” He found himself searching Dick’s face to find some shred of recollection, but there was nothing. But there had been a lot of men he didn’t know, and even more that he hadn’t taken in because he hadn’t especially wanted to remember them. “Jumped into Normandy on D-Day,” he added, and was surprised to see emotion flood Dick’s face before he managed to rein it back in. 

“Me too,” Dick said. “And into Holland.”

“Yep,” Lew agreed. “And—” He remembered his last jump and felt a sour taste flood his mouth. Words were impossible: he thought of that burning plane and how unworthy he had felt to be one of the ones who had survived. He remembered writing all those goddamned letters. He had never felt worthy since then, and he suspected that he never would. 

There was sympathy on Dick’s face. “It isn’t always easy to talk about.”

“Yeah,” Lew agreed, seizing onto the chance to discuss something else. He didn’t think he could find any more words about the war. There had been good times, when he was using his brain, when he felt as though good had been done and perhaps he had made some small contribution towards that. There had been exhilaration, and he had fiercely enjoyed doing something he was good at. There had been friendships too, although thinking about it now, he couldn’t remember the last time he had written to Harry or Ron or Lip. He had a vague sense that he had been happier during parts of the war than he was now, but that seemed strange and possibly morally grey, so he didn’t feel especially comfortable saying it aloud. He could see military written all over Dick now that he knew: the set of his shoulders, the spare and thoughtful way that he spoke. There was something softer about his face than Lew had initially realised, the sense that a smile was hovering behind his slightly stern expression. But he didn’t feel that he could handle talking about the war right now. Some days it was more raw than others, and apparently today was one of the tougher ones. Instead he said, “So what did you do after the war?”

Nothing interesting, was apparently the answer. Dick had moved to New Jersey and worked a job for a couple of years that he couldn’t seem to find much to say about, and around a month or so ago he had started a new job at a factory that made metal farm equipment. “I don’t know why I’m in New Jersey, really,” he confessed. “There isn’t anything for me here. I think I’m going to move back to Pennsylvania.”

“Are you married? Find yourself a nice Dutch girl.”

Dick made a scoffing noise in his throat. “Yeah. Maybe.”

“Don’t sound so happy about it,” Lew said. “Why not?”

Dick looked uncomfortable for a second, and then he said, as if he really wasn’t sure of the answer, “I – don’t know.” He cleared his throat. “What about you?”

“Oh, I’m not married. Tried it once, but I don’t like things I’m no good at.” It was a bad joke, but he hadn’t expected Dick to look quite so sorry for him. “It was a long time ago,” he said, feeling as though he was trying to cheer Dick up, rather than the other way around. “Got a letter when I was in Europe. She took my dog, can you believe that? And our kid.”

“Nice priorities there, Lewis,” Dick said, looking as though he was trying not to laugh.

Lew tried and failed to look shame-faced. “Well, the dog liked me more than the kid did.”

Dick did laugh at that, and Lew felt triumphant, although the truth was that Michael didn’t know him well enough to like or dislike him. That automatically made Lew’s relationship with him better than his relationship with his own father had ever been, so it wasn’t so bad. “Here,” he said. “Finish your soup, and we’ll go for a walk.”

Outside the wind seemed to have eased off a little. Dick eyed the grey skies, and then he shrugged a shoulder and said, “Okay.”

*

There was something invigorating about the wind and the water, and Lew could tell that Dick felt it too. His cheeks were stung red by the wind and his blue eyes were bright and he looked as though he was always on the verge of smiling. Lew felt the urge to impress him, so he told stories that made him laugh, about the surprisingly dumb people he’d met at Yale, and his little sister’s habit of rescuing every small creature she came across even if it didn’t need rescuing, and his first ever date with Kathy, which had ended abruptly when they both began to feel the effects of some badly-prepared seafood. “I don’t think that was a good sign,” Lew yelled over the sound of the waves crashing, admiring the way that Dick’s red hair was getting mussed by the wind out of the corner of his eye.

They sat together on some steps in an area that was sheltered from the wind. Dick said, “I should be getting home. The train takes a while,” and didn’t move a muscle. 

“Nah, you should stay here with me,” Lew told him, and Dick raised an eyebrow and pressed his lips together. There were a thousand ways that he stifled his smiles. “Where do you live, anyway?”

Dick told him, and Lew goggled at him. “No kidding. That’s a town across from me. What do you say I give you a ride back?”

“The train is perfectly fine,” Dick said, “but thank you.” 

“Suit yourself.” Lew dug into his inside pocket to pull out his flask. There was nothing as warming as a swig of whisky. He offered it to Dick, who shook his head. Their thighs were pressed together, and Lew liked the pressure of it even through the fabric of their overcoats and pants. He could feel that his own hair was wild and salt-licked, but he could feel Dick shooting minute glances at him every so often in a way that indicated he didn’t mind how messy Lew’s hair was, so it didn’t seem to matter. There seemed to be a sort of significance in the way that Dick didn’t move away from him; sure, it was cold, but there wasn’t any reason for two men to sit touching like this except for the obvious. That would be nice, Lew thought. Dick was a good-looking man, genial and more humorous than he liked to pretend he was. They had probably brushed past each other at some time during the war, and it made a difference to be sitting next to someone who understood what had happened in Europe, what they had seen and done. 

The sky was already getting darker, although it wasn’t late; it was that time of year, gloomy and miserable and dim. It was starting to be cold and uncomfortable, and Dick was shivering a little. Lew got to his feet and held out a hand to Dick, who took it after a second of hesitation to pull himself up. “Come on. Let’s get you on that train.” 

They walked back across the sand together; Dick said, “Race you to that bench,” and beat him squarely, barely even out of breath by the time Lew caught him up. 

“I can’t run in dress shoes on sand!” Lew complained. He wasn’t a terrible runner: he’d managed Currahee, after all, three miles up and three down again, although he had to concede that if he had to try it these days he’d probably vomit on himself and pass out and have to be carried down. 

Dick looked pointedly down at his own dress shoes on the sand, and said, “Sure you can’t.” 

Lew shoved Dick’s shoulder with his own and Dick laughed and leaned against him. “How about we swim out to that buoy?” Lew asked, gesturing out at the water. “Not today. I’ll bring you back in spring.”

Dick just shook his head and rolled his eyes a little, but it wasn’t a no so Lew decided to count it as a yes. They walked together to the train station and by the time they’d arrived the sky was almost dark, and rain was threatening to fall. “So when do I get to see you again?” Lew asked.

Dick had gone red, he was certain of it, although the light was low so it was impossible to tell for sure. “We live in almost the same place,” he said, “we’re bound to run into each other some time.”

“And you’re sure you won’t let me give you a ride home?” Lew asked.

“I’m sure.” Dick had turned his head a little to hide his smile and Lewis moved with him, eyes on his face so he didn’t miss out on a thing. There was something about this man that he liked very much: his frankness when he spoke, his voice that was quiet but certain, the complete lack of bullshit. It had been easy to spend the afternoon with him, walking and talking and sitting close together, and he thought that Dick felt it too. The idea of never seeing him again felt odd, as though it would be emphatically the wrong decision to make. 

“Look,” Dick said, “my train, I have to—” and he moved away, and Lew reached out and caught onto the sleeve of his overcoat and said, fumbling like a child for words, “Listen – listen, I like you,” and Dick drew in a breath and looked for a moment dazzlingly happy, as though the sun had come out and was shining through his face. He found Lew’s hand with his own and held it briefly before breaking away again, still smiling like God himself wouldn’t be able to wipe that grin off his face, as he made his way through the tiny station towards the platforms. Before he turned the corner he looked back at Lew, his smile half-faded and his eyebrows furrowed incredulously. _I’m here_ , Lew wanted to tell him, _I’m real and so are you and we were both here today, and could life get any sweeter than that?_

Dick’s frown relaxed, and he smiled again as he turned around the corner and vanished from sight.

*

Lew felt the same way he’d felt the first time he’d leapt out of a plane. Some of the guys had been freaking out, there had been one kid holding back tears, another who had failed at holding back vomit, and he had been apprehensive, sure, but the second he’d leapt out into the air, every single nerve had abruptly vanished. He fell and then his chute billowed open and he caught in midair and drifted instead. He’d been able to hear the noise from the airplane engines and the other guys hollering, but he’d felt removed from those things, in his own little world, just himself and the sky; and then he’d landed and he’d been unable to stop himself from smiling, from laughing even, just from the simple joy of it. He’d had so much energy that he hadn’t known what to do with it, other than being delighted that he got to go back up into the sky and jump again. 

Getting into his car he felt the exact same way; he found himself slapping the steering wheel and saying “Ha!” aloud and grinning like a fool at absolutely nothing. He thought of Dick’s face and his pink cheeks in the cold and the way he’d held onto Lew’s hand at the end, just for a second. How long did the train back home take, anyway? He had never taken it (had he?) but he knew that it was a frustratingly slow service that stopped at a thousand tiny country stations. He could beat the train back if he floored it, and so he did.

It had taken him around an hour to drive to Spring Lake, and only fifty minutes to drive back. He parked outside the train station and cranked the window down a notch so he could smoke without filling the car with a grey haze, and got through two and a half cigarettes before a train pulled in. He’d almost finished his third cigarette by the time he saw Dick’s figure, his overcoat collar flipped up and his hair blazing beneath his hat. Lew felt his heart pound joyfully as he flicked the cigarette butt out of the window. Slowly he pulled up alongside Dick, who was walking fast and with purpose; it wasn’t as windy as it had been on the beach but it was cold, and starting to drizzle. Lew banged his fist on the horn to get Dick’s attention and for a split second saw what his men must have seen in the army: his face was stern as he turned and fierce in a way that was not unattractive. Lew leaned over and rolled down the window on the passenger side and said, “Hey, you want a taxi?”

The fierceness faded as fast as it had arrived, and Dick gazed open-mouthed into the car. “My God,” he said, and looked up at the sky before letting out a breath and climbing right in. “You know,” he said, as he put his seatbelt on carefully, “I’m not all that surprised.”

“By what?”

“By you, just showing up.” 

Lew laughed as he pulled away, delighted that Dick seemed to know him that well already. “Why not?”

He felt Dick’s eyes on him, and then Dick said, “I guess you seem like that kind of guy.”

“What kind of guy’s that?” Lew threw a smile sideways at him.

There was a moment of quiet, and then Dick said, “Surprising. Fun. Kind.”

Lew knew he could be surprising – although _shocking_ was the word that had generally been used – and he also knew that if he’d had a few drinks, he could be fun enough to keep a party going late into the early hours of the morning. But kind? There was something about that word that knocked all the air out of his lungs. He shook his head a little and said, “Well,” and couldn’t find any other words, but Dick seemed to get it because he reached over to gently touch the back of Lew’s hand on the steering wheel with his fingertips. 

Dick directed him to his apartment, which was the top floor of a rather dusty-looking old house. When Lew pulled up outside Dick sat there in the passenger seat for a second too long, and then he said, “So, you want to, uh – you want to see the place?”

“Sure I do,” Lew said. “Aren’t you supposed to ask me up for a drink? Isn’t that how it goes?”

“Well, I don’t have the drinks that you’d probably expect,” Dick said. 

“Lucky for me,” Lew said, tapping his flask inside his coat, “I’ve got my own.”

Dick rolled his eyes, looking amused and disapproving at the same time, which funnily enough was a reaction that Lew had provoked in a lot of people. He reached down into the footwell absently for the scarf that Lew had discarded there earlier, and wrapped it around his neck as they got out of the car. It was oddly endearing that a man like him had accidentally stolen something, so Lew decided not to tell him, and instead to wait for the moment he realised so he could see Dick’s eyes open wide in horror. 

Inside, he followed Dick up two dark flights of stairs and stood behind him as he unlocked his door. “It’s temporary,” Dick said, pre-emptively defensive. “And I only just moved in.”

“It’s okay,” Lew said. “Believe me, my place is a mess.” It had deteriorated lately – he had a housekeeper who came most days but there was still an air of dereliction that he didn’t know how to handle, and anyway, lately she seemed to have neglected to show up. He seemed to forget to buy food a lot of the time too, and seemed to fall asleep on the couch half-soused and to wake up at four o’clock in the morning with the doors unlocked and the lights blazing overhead. 

Dick’s place wasn’t much better. The furniture had a shabby air of being the kind of old trash that came with the rental, and the whole place was so tidy that it seemed barren and unlived-in. There was one room that served as the living room and kitchen, and a small corridor that he assumed led to the bedroom and bathroom. Once Dick turned on a couple of lamps the dark walls seemed less oppressive, and it felt almost cosy despite the fact it wasn’t especially warm in there. On the mantel there was a framed photograph of lines of soldiers, which Lew didn’t feel particularly inclined to look at closely, alongside photographs of people he assumed were Dick’s family: a blonde girl who had the same determined set to her mouth must have been his little sister. 

Dick had taken off his coat slowly, and hung it alongside his hat and the stolen scarf on the stand. Lew shed his too, and rubbed his hands together as he turned to look at Dick. “How about that drink?”

“Sure.” Dick snapped to, and crossed to the kitchen area. “I have – coffee, and tea, and milk – oh, I forgot I had beer.” He took a bottle out of the fridge and looked at it as though the writing was in another language. “My friend visited,” he explained. “You’re more than welcome to it.”

There was something sweet about a grown man who felt the urge to make an excuse for keeping something as everyday as beer in his fridge. “I’ll take it happily,” Lew said, reaching for the bottle. Dick poured himself a glass of water (which in Lew’s opinion certainly deserved more of an excuse than the beer) and they sat alongside each other on the couch, a sort of awkward silence descending on them. Lew sipped his beer and Dick ran the tip of his index finger around the rim of his glass before wincing when it vibrated, high-pitched. 

“So why did you move?” Lew asked, mostly to break the quiet.

Dick looked puzzled and then he said, “I don’t know. I guess I just wanted a change.”

Lew could certainly understand that feeling. “Sometimes I think about moving somewhere entirely different,” he said. “My mom lived down in Florida for a while, but it’s that sticky heat, you know? I don’t want to spend my life sweating. There’s California – maybe San Francisco.”

“I once knew a guy who drove a cab in San Francisco,” Dick said, and Lew smiled at him, thinking of Joe Liebgott for the first time in years, wondering what the hell that guy was up to these days, and said, “Really? I once knew a guy who cut hair over there.” 

“No kidding,” Dick said. He had started to relax now, leaning against the sofa arm and tilting his body so he was facing Lew. “What about England?”

“What about it?” Lew said. “I knew a young lady over there—” What had happened with Irene, anyway? A whole lot of flirting and a whole lack of pay-off. She’d been a nice girl, though. She’d liked him. That was more than could be said for most people. “Never considered staying, though.”

“I was billeted with an older couple over there,” Dick said. “Their son had died already in the war. They treated me as though I was theirs while I was there – I went to church with them, we read together.” His mouth hitched up in a half-smile. “They made me tea. A lot of tea.”

“Tea isn’t so bad,” Lew said, although he wasn’t sure he’d ever had it without a slosh of whisky topping it up. 

“Well, it’s no coffee,” Dick said, “but I definitely appreciated it. Sometimes I drink a cup of tea now and I think of them.”

“You sentimental bastard,” Lew said, and Dick smiled at him, a little bashful. Lew had rented his own place in England, a modest cottage that overlooked the village green. In hindsight he should probably have found himself a family to stay with as well and got some home cooking under his belt. Even so, he wasn’t sure how well he could have rubbed along with some English family he didn’t know, and he didn’t remember feeling dreadfully lonely when he was in England. He knew he’d spent a lot of nights drinking with Harry; maybe, at the time, that had been enough. It wasn’t as though he’d ever been much good at family.

Dick got to his feet and crossed the room to the record player. It seemed an odd extravagance for a man like him in an apartment like this one, and from the looks of things he didn’t have many records in the neat stack on the shelf below the player. “Music?” he asked, looking over his shoulder at Lew, and Lew waved a hand that meant, _Sure_. Dick selected a record and placed it on the turntable, set the needle. “Ella sings Gershwin.”

“Ella?” Lew asked.

“Fitzgerald.” Dick looked at him expectantly.

Lew shrugged a shoulder. “Never heard of her. I love Gershwin, though.”

The song began in a sweep of strings and Dick hovered by the record player awkwardly. Lew got up to take a look at the record sleeve, which he didn’t recognise despite knowing plenty of the songs, and then had a strange, sort of visceral reaction when the vocals came in. Ella’s voice was like honey, so smooth that it didn’t seem possible. “Oh, Ella, baby,” he said, and Dick laughed, looking pleased, and said, “I thought it was the kind of thing you’d like.”

“I don’t just like it – I love it.” He closed his eyes for a second and let the song sink into him. When he opened his eyes again Dick was looking at him, and on his face there was so much naked want that it made Lew almost weak at the knees. Without thinking about it, he extended a hand, and after a second Dick reached out to take it. “Dance with me,” Lew said, half-expecting Dick to refuse, but instead his eyes widened a fraction and he took a step closer.

Lew had never danced with a man before. There had been men in the past, a few of them, at boarding school and at college, but there had never been anything as sweet and innocent as dancing. Still, it was easier than he had expected to find his place in Dick’s arms, and to fit their bodies together, like their limbs already knew the score. Their hands stayed linked, and he felt Dick slide his arm around his waist, which meant that Lew’s hand went up to his shoulder. He thought he should make some dumb joke about _Oh, for Christ’s sake, why do I have to be the girl_ , but Dick’s eyes were serious and steady, and he felt a sort of thrum in the pit of his stomach that made him feel as though this moment was important, and that he shouldn’t break it at any cost. 

He slid his hand around to rest on the back of Dick’s collar, to touch the short hairs on the nape of his neck. He studied his face carefully and liked what he saw there more and more every second: Dick’s lashes were longer than he’d thought, tipped with blond so pale it was almost transparent, and from his nose to his mouth there were lines that only served to deepen his smiles. There were bags under his eyes that spoke of late nights and too many worries, and Lew wanted to figure out how to soothe those away. But right now there was nothing he could do except hold him closer. He rested his cheek on Dick’s shoulder, inhaling his clean scent that made him feel so much it was overwhelming, and felt Dick tuck his face in too. Lew felt so content, as though he was exactly where he should be, and as though for once his body knew exactly what it was doing without him having to work anything out or overthink it. 

They moved together until the song was over and the next one had started – this one was a little faster and frankly Lew didn’t have any intention of doing anything more than a slow sway right now, so he lifted his head again and looked into Dick’s eyes. Their mouths found each other then, easy as anything; it felt like a blissful sigh, as though he had been underwater and had broken through the surface. It wasn’t supposed to be as simple as this, to find a fellow who was interested in this sort of thing: there were bars you went to, Lew was sure of it, and covert signals that he had never had to master. And he’d gone to a beach on a rainy day and met a man he liked, and that was it. Could this be it? Could anything ever be this easy?

The feel of Dick’s mouth against his, the taste of him; he kissed like he did everything else, methodical and thoughtful and getting the job done. Lew wanted to press himself against him like a cat, right down to the purring, especially as Dick drew him in tighter. “Hey,” he murmured against the corner of Lew’s mouth, “you want to see my room?”

“Huh,” Lew said, finding himself a little out of breath, “I mean, I could be persuaded.” 

Dick laughed and kissed him again, and they were lucky that the corridor to the bedroom wasn’t long because they didn’t seem to want to let go of each other. As it was, Lew accidentally banged his shoulder into the doorframe and pouted about it to make Dick roll his eyes affectionately, which he did, and then Lew pushed him down onto the bed and enjoyed watching that affection turn into wide-eyed desire.

Incongruously, they were still wearing their shoes. Lew toed his off and bent to undo Dick’s laces, which were tied in careful double knots. He pulled Dick’s socks off too, and felt an odd urge to kiss the pale curve of bone at the top of his ankle beneath a knot of scar tissue; he restrained himself, but looked up to see Dick’s brows furrowed in what was almost but not quite a frown. Helpless, that was it; that was the word, that was how Lew felt too. 

He straddled Dick on the bed then and turned his face down to kiss him again. He could still hear Ella singing faintly in the living room and didn’t think he’d ever had a more beautiful soundtrack when he’d gone to bed with someone. It had been a long while since he could recall doing this, and the feeling of being so close to another human being was intoxicating. Dick held onto him, one hand on his back and the other on his ass. Lew wanted to touch him everywhere and so he did, hand stroking the side of his face, his neck, the other running up his solid chest. He’d stayed in better shape than Lew after the war, from the feel of things. 

He began to undo Dick’s shirt, greedy for the sight and feel of more of his skin. He was pale and scattered with freckles, all taut lines and narrow curves; Lew tugged gently at the hair on his chest and got a muffled moan for his trouble. The kiss broke and he felt Dick’s mouth on his jaw, his neck; he tilted his head back to give him better access and dug his fingernails in gently to Dick’s shoulder.

Dick pulled him forward; they untangled themselves and immediately pressed together again as they fell onto their sides. He was being thoroughly kissed again, Dick’s hand making its way up and down his side, his hip, his ass, and Lew found himself flinging a leg over Dick’s thighs in a quest for more closeness, to press tighter against him, to crawl inside his skin if it was possible. He could feel Dick’s cock hard through his pants and pushed against it, fumbled down to unbuckle his belt and unzip his pants, wondering not for the first time why it was necessary to wear so many clothes in life when constant nudity would be considerably more convenient. Dick let out a breath when Lew pressed a hand into his underwear to wrap around the length of him before kissing him back even harder, like he was starting to get to the brink of losing some of his control. Lew liked the idea of making him do that. He liked the idea of making him go a little wild for the first time since they’d met earlier that day. How was it only a few hours ago?

“Get your goddamn pants off,” he managed against Dick’s mouth, and together they managed to find their way out of their trousers without letting go of each other entirely. Lew’s pants stuck on his left foot and he scowled at them, kicking hard until they flew across the room and hit Dick’s dresser, scattering change as they went. Dick laughed, face against Lew’s collarbone, and Lew stroked his fingers through his hair and dipped his face to kiss his forehead before finding his mouth again.

It was easy to find what Dick liked; that spot on his stomach that made him shiver, and when Lew tugged at his bottom lip with his teeth he half-moaned and leaned into it. He had seemed like a restrained kind of guy but Lew was gratified to find out that in bed he wasn’t like that even a little: he seemed to know what he wanted and to be confident when it came to taking it. He felt Dick kissing his chest, mouthing against his nipple, the faintest scratch of stubble so short it was only evident through touch. He spread his legs so that Dick could rest between them and heard himself let out a shuddering sigh when Dick leaned forward and took his cock into his mouth. He could feel the grip of Dick’s hands, one curved around his thigh and the other on his hip, rubbing his thumb against his hipbone like a secret message that said _You’re okay, you’re okay._

He was more than okay. He was excellent. He had never been better. Dick was pressing a hand between his legs and he was more than happy to let him do so. When was the last time he’d done this? So long ago that he could barely remember – before the war, that was for sure, before training, before all of that, but his body seemed to know what to do. It was like coming home; his body felt liquid and he sank his fingers into the sheets, giving himself into this pure pleasure – and after all, pleasure was what he was best at, so why the hell not?

Dick had started to play with his hole, pressing his fingertip inside gently like he was waiting for Lew’s reaction. As if he’d ever say no to getting well and truly fucked. It had been so long but he could still remember the blissful physicality of it, of feeling wrung out and fucked out; he had a sudden visceral recollection of driving to work at Nixon Nitration aching in the sweetest way possible (what had happened? clearly he’d been so drunk he’d forgotten the details of that encounter entirely), but it was chased out of his mind by Dick pulling back and away. “No fair, give a guy a little warning,” Lew complained.

Dick hummed out a laugh. His mouth was puffy and red, and he was flushed and rumpled and gorgeous. Lew wanted to do every unspeakable thing under the sun to him and with him. Even the smell of his sweat was clean and attractive. He had never wanted to press his face into a guy’s armpit before, and he’d definitely restrain himself from doing it right now, but hell, he was tempted. Dick was a little out of breath as he said, “I just gotta,” and disappeared out of the room.

“You just gotta what?” Lew yelled, probably too loudly, after him, and heard Dick splutter in surprise.

“Keep your damn voice down,” he said as he came back into the room, although he was smiling. He was also clutching a bottle of lotion, so that was apparently what he ‘just gotta’. 

“Okay, that’s allowed,” Lew said. “I will concede to your better judgement, Mr Winters.”

“You talk a lot of bullcrap,” Dick said as he got back onto the bed, on his knees, settling back down over Lew. “Anyone ever told you that?”

“Bull _crap_? No, I can’t say that they have,” Lew said. Dick was looking down at him with fond eyes; it was incredible and awful simultaneously. It made him want to shrink away and open up and blush and preen, all at the same time. Dick made him feel as though maybe he was something worth looking at. He knew he wasn’t a bad-looking guy, better when he was younger but not a total goddamn horror show even now; but Dick seemed to be looking at more than his face and his body. He seemed to be looking all the way into Lew’s eyes, and if Dick was happy with what he saw there, Lew felt that maybe he should be too.

Then again, Dick didn’t know him at all. He felt the plunging weight of despair, surprising and inevitable at the same time, and Dick frowned minutely at him. Lew pressed a smile back onto his face and Dick looked satisfied and said, “Anyway, it’s not Mr Winters: it’s Major Winters.”

“Major Winters?” The despair faded a fraction and Lew found himself delighted and a little turned on by hearing his rank. “I was only a captain.”

“Oh, captain, my captain,” Dick murmured, leaning down to kiss his neck, hand creeping between his legs again.

“Walt Whitman?” Lew shuffled down on the bed, arching his hips.

“I took a poetry class at college.”

Lew laughed and dragged his fingertips through Dick’s hair and then over his shoulders and the muscles at the top of his back. “The captain in that poem dies.”

“Huh.” Dick stopped kissing him for a moment before murmuring against his throat, “I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Me too,” Lew said, and realised that for the first time in a while he really felt that way. The thought of dying over in Europe, not getting to eat pancakes in a diner by the beach, not tasting sea salt on his lips on a windy day, not getting to be fingered by an incredibly good-looking redheaded fellow in a slightly sad and dingy apartment – this was living, right? This was real freedom. This was the American goddamn dream. He touched the underside of Dick’s chin so he could kiss him again, a little softer now, and gasped and bit Dick’s lip harder than he meant to when Dick slipped another finger inside him. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and Dick said something indecipherable against his lips that didn’t seem important because Lew could taste his smile.

By the time Dick settled between his legs he felt as though his body was made out of molten metal; he didn’t know how it was possible to be so relaxed and so incredibly turned on, so taken apart and put back together at the same time. His cock was painfully hard against his stomach and every time he went to touch himself in an effort to feel a little relief, Dick gave him such a stern look that he felt it would be madness to ignore it. 

“Listen,” he thought he’d better say, one hand on the back of Dick’s neck and his knee hitched on Dick’s hip, the fingers of his other hand around Dick’s lotion-slicked cock, “it’s been a little while, so…”

“Me too,” Dick admitted, and they shared a small smile. Dick leaned in and kissed him then, almost sweet and chaste, and said, “Listen, tell me, all right, if…”

“Sure,” Lew said, “sure,” although he was pretty certain that there was no way in hell he was about to complain about anything Dick was about to do to him. Still, he didn’t remember the last time he’d done this, couldn’t remember any names or faces, which didn’t say anything good at all about his sexual past. His body seemed to know, though. He felt that sweet blunt pressure, that stretch, that fullness, Dick’s breath warm on the side of his face, Dick’s voice saying, “Lew, God, Lew,” and he heard himself groaning, “Oh, Christ.” He didn’t know why but there was something almost emotional about it. He didn’t recollect the last time he’d done this but it seemed as though his body remembered, because he felt no awkwardness at all, no real pain, which was frankly a relief because he hadn’t been able to help but notice that Dick wasn’t a small guy in any way. He felt a swell of emotion in his chest and although he wasn’t sure if it was happy or sad, he was grateful for it nonetheless.

He pulled Dick’s face down so they could kiss; it was messy, the bed wasn’t the most sturdy piece of equipment in the world and the metal posts of the headboard were clacking against the wall whenever Dick moved too much, but he wanted Dick’s lips against his anyway. He wasn’t sure what he might be moved to say if his mouth wasn’t otherwise occupied. Was it possible to come on too strong when a guy was inside you? Lew loved sex any which way, he loved it with women too, although that had been a while as well. With guys he loved getting sucked off, he had some pretty excellent memories of fucking a guy at Yale from behind so hard they’d almost broken a desk, but getting fucked was special. He thought it was probably because it was something he had never imagined for himself when he was a kid. When he’d been a creepy little teenager the way all boys were creepy little teenagers, he’d jerked off thinking about titty-fucking and what he imagined pussy tasted like and (occasionally) about what his dad’s driver’s cock would feel like in his hand, but he had never thought of this. It didn’t feel illicit exactly but it did feel intensely intimate, a way of seeing himself that he had never imagined, a person who he’d never thought he might be, a person completely different from who he’d been as a boy and an unhappy young man. He liked that he was the sort of person who could do this and not feel like less of a man.

Dick was fucking him harder now, the two of them both sweating, gleaming gold in the light; the bed made an ominous cracking noise and Dick paused, hovering above him, his eyes suddenly wide and his biceps straining. “I’ll buy you a new bed if this one breaks,” Lew offered breathlessly, “just don’t damn well _stop_ ,” and Dick said, “Yessir,” and took his time, slow and deliberate, as he pulled almost all the way out before fucking right back in again. Lew heard himself shout, ridiculously and embarrassingly loud, toes curling as he gripped at Dick’s back, almost coming right there and then. 

He couldn’t think, he couldn’t do anything except feel, his whole body and his heart as well. The world around them seemed to be disintegrating and he had never been more aware of another human being, Dick’s mouth and his cock and the smoothness of his skin; Lew gripped his ass and urged him on, faster, harder, he could take it, like that, there, there—

Dick’s mouth on his neck as Lew tilted his head back to gasp for air, his fingers knotted in Dick’s hair, his other hand on his cock now because he couldn’t not touch himself, he couldn’t not urge himself towards that sweet ending despite the fact he didn’t want it to be over. Dick covered his hand with his own and said, “I want to see you,” and looked intently at Lew’s face as he fucked him, and Lew found himself coming, helpless and gasping and cursing, pulsing hot onto Dick’s belly and their hands. Dick stilled – a gentleman, clearly, because judging from his face it was a superhuman effort to do so – and when Lew gasped out, “You’re okay,” he started fucking him again, hard and fast. It was almost too much, he was almost too sensitive, but he found himself liking that, and he liked looking at Dick’s face too, the intensity of his eyes, the line of his mouth. “Come on, baby,” Lew found himself saying, and Dick leaned in to seize his mouth with his own, more of a bite than a kiss, and then Lew felt him coming, his body almost shaking, felt spilling warmth inside himself, and then Dick stilled, breathing heavily.

There was something infernally awkward about disentangling afterwards, but today wasn’t so bad; the corner of Dick’s mouth twitched a little and Lew groaned softly but then they settled together, Dick bracing himself on his forearms and leaning in to kiss him, slower now and deliberate. Then he rolled over onto his side and pulled Lew with him, so they were facing each other. He felt Dick’s hands on him now like he was exploring, his fingertips up and down Lew’s spine and shoulder blades, and then his other hand on the side of his face, the pad of his thumb running soft over his cheekbone and pushing his hair off his forehead. The attention embarrassed and delighted him at the same time. “Bet you’re glad you called in sick now,” Lew muttered with a lazy smile.

Dick choked out a soft laugh. “You’re telling me. Are you good?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been better.” That felt entirely honest and Dick smiled, looking pleased. His hair was dishevelled, and his pale skin was pink and blotchy in places; Lew felt that not many people got to see him looking so messed up, and he felt privileged. He also felt sore and aching, in a wonderful way. “Hey, tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“All day long,” Dick agreed. He sounded like he wasn’t far off falling asleep.

“You want to hang out?” Was he coming on too strong? It wasn’t the kind of offer he’d usually make, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so comfortable.

“Yeah,” Dick said, without having to consider it. Then he frowned and said, “I need to get groceries.”

Lew shrugged a shoulder. “So I’ll come with you to the store.”

“All right,” Dick said affably. He half-yawned, catching it behind his hand, and lifted his head to look behind Lew at what he figured out a second later was a clock. “You know it’s only nine?”

“And here you are, falling asleep.” Lew ran fingertips over the slight dip between Dick’s ribs and hip and felt him wriggle. 

“Yeah, well, you can blame yourself for that,” Dick said, although he looked more alert now. “Are you hungry? I’m kind of hungry.”

“I could eat,” Lew said. He could mostly always eat, but he was also often too lazy to actually do so. 

“You want a bacon sandwich?”

“I don’t remember a second of my life in which I didn’t want a bacon sandwich,” Lew said truthfully. Dick smiled and swooped in to kiss the corner of his mouth before shifting over and out of bed. He pulled his shorts back on before moving through into the other room. Lew stretched out his legs and found himself smiling at the ceiling. Dick’s rickety bed was surprisingly comfortable, but equally he could probably have fallen asleep no problem on a haystack right now, or back in that foxhole in the snow. He felt more sober than he had in weeks, alert and bright and full of joy. From the kitchen he smelled bacon frying, and he heard Ella singing, and he thought with a jolt of surprise, _Oh: so this is what happiness is._

_**last week** _

Dick had got himself some kind of godawful new job, Lew had heard all about it from his secretary Mary. Apparently Dick had telephoned her for some infernal reason, probably just to piss Lew off. He was doing something similar at another factory that made something catastrophically goddamn dull like farm machinery, and Lew bet that his salary had gone down, because they’d paid him more than they needed to at the nitration works because that was how much they valued him, that was how much Lew himself had valued him, as an employee but also as a man, and he didn’t know what to do with himself if Dick didn’t realise that, if he didn’t realise how valued he was, and how beloved too. He didn’t know what to do if Dick refused to come back. Stanhope had started making noises about interviewing new candidates for Dick’s old job but Lew couldn’t bear to think of someone else in his office. It was intolerable, being at work all day and not being able to go into Dick’s office at lunch, not to be able to lean on the corner of his desk and flirt with him as much as they dared when they were at work, to tilt his head and smile down at him in that way that always made a blush flare on his cheeks. Not seeing that blush again was the most excruciating thing of all.

Lew had screwed up, sure, but didn’t everyone screw up at times? He hadn’t done anything really wrong: he hadn’t been with anyone else, he hadn’t hit him (dear God, the thought of that) (but had he hit him? had they hit each other? there were so many nights from which he remembered nothing that he realised, with a sinking feeling, that he didn’t know). It hadn’t been one big disaster, it had been a thousand shitty little incidents – and maybe breaking up had been for the best. Maybe it had been the only possible thing to do. The idea of looking into Dick’s eyes and seeing that martyred fucking recrimination again made all the skin on Lew’s body start to itch. If he didn’t want Dick back, which he didn’t—

But he did. Of course he did. How could he live the rest of his life without Dick in it? He had known Dick for eight years, three at war and five in peacetime, although for the last God knew how long, life hadn’t felt particularly peaceful. But that was okay. They loved each other and they could reform and reshape that love into something that could survive everything else in their lives. He would stop drinking – or at least he’d cut back, because he knew that was a problem, but he also felt as though Dick was being a tight-ass about it. It was impossible to live up to Dick’s standards because Dick was the only person in the world who found those standards even a little attainable. So Lew wouldn’t stop drinking entirely, because he didn’t need to, damn it, and it was unfair to expect him to, but in an effort to placate Dick he would cut down. It didn’t seem fair that he was always the one who had to compromise. The only reason he ever drank a whole bottle of wine was that the guy he lived with refused to split it with him, so it wasn’t entirely his own fault.

And he would work harder, too. He would go into the works more frequently, and learn more of the employees’ names. He would do his best to find the day-to-day business more interesting. He would start to care about it all like Dick did. He would get up earlier at the weekends – not at the crack of dawn like Dick, but around nine o’clock or so, and then they would be able to do more when they were off work, which would make Dick happy. The thought of that little compromise was certainly more appealing than working more and drinking less: Dick could show him how to tend the backyard, and he could help out there. Maybe he could learn to grow things, roses and tomato plants and other tangible things that he could hold in his hands like little accomplishments. That would make Dick proud, he knew it would.

They could go for walks together in the afternoon. They could go to lunch at nice places – although, he thought with a scowl, it would have to be mid-priced places so that Dick didn’t turn his nose up at the prices on the menu. Dick claimed not to be a snob, Dick claimed that _Lew_ was the snob, although he said it so lightly that it could have been mistaken for a joke if Lew didn’t know him so damn well, but there were different kinds of snobbery. Lew liked nice things, and he wasn’t ashamed of that, while Dick turned his nose up at every damn thing and then pretended he wasn’t doing it, pretended he was just being sensible, whatever that meant. The fact was, they were lucky and they had all the money in the world, and they donated some of that money to good causes so they had no reason to feel guilty when they splashed out on themselves every now and then. Lew felt that sometimes it was perfectly acceptable to buy a pair of shoes that you didn’t need and that weren’t on sale, and Dick did not, and that difference between them was intensely frustrating. Living with someone who was perfect was not as easy as he’d thought it would be.

Still, it seemed useless to end it all entirely. When things were good, they were ideal; nobody was as interesting as Dick, nobody made him feel as understood or as comfortable, nobody made him laugh as much, which would probably have surprised most other people because Dick was not generally known as a laugh-a-minute kind of a guy. They’d had problems before, because every couple had problems. It had taken them a little while to figure things out, and for a while Lew had a crisis of confidence and assumed it was all temporary and that Dick would eventually, and exceedingly politely, leave him for a woman with whom he could produce redheaded babies. 

He had also felt cripplingly guilty for some time about the works, because he knew Dick wasn’t a sitting behind a desk person, and here Lew had trapped him in a job he didn’t care for, in a city that meant nothing to him, in a house he hadn’t chosen, with a man who couldn’t give him everything that he wanted. Moving out of Nixon had helped a little – Dick liked living further out in the country, and Lew liked that Dick was happy. They talked about getting a dog, although that dog hadn’t materialised. Thank God for that; Lew couldn’t imagine having to miss a goddamn dog as well as Dick. That might have been the thing that really pushed him over the edge.

Things had come to a head, though, and Dick had left. Because they’d had problems before, Lew had assumed that it was not permanent. In the past, he’d spent a few days in the city with Blanche while things cooled off, or Dick had visited his mom and sister – that was another thing that Dick was sore about, the fact that Lew rarely went with him to Lancaster. But it was hard to handle, because families weren’t his thing. And anyway, he was certain that Dick’s mother disliked him and that she sensed that Lew was what was standing in the way of Dick finding a nice woman and making her some grandbabies. At least she hadn’t realised the exact reason for that, which was that her perfect angel son was regularly being plowed ten ways from Sunday by the disreputable man she barely knew who smelled of smoke and whisky and made inappropriate jokes whenever possible.

For a while Lew had thought that Dick would come back. For a couple days, he hadn’t even wanted him to. He said, _Good riddance_ , and started to collect the things that Dick had left behind into a large paper bag that he’d kept by the front door, scowling at it every time he passed by. But then he came to his senses, and put the things back away again, and waited for Dick to come home. Dick had gone to Lancaster, and taken a few days of vacation from work – and then, at the end of that vacation, he’d handed in his notice – to Stanhope, no less! Which meant that Lew hadn’t even heard about it for a week, and had to pretend he wasn’t violently shocked and nauseous when it was casually mentioned in a meeting one morning. He’d spent a couple of days not sleeping and drinking and waiting for Dick to retract that notice, and then Mary mentioned Dick’s new job—

And now here he was, standing like a lovesick fool – which was about right – outside the factory where Dick had taken his new job, and waiting for him to come out. He was sober, mostly sober, and the air was clean and cold. He wanted a cigarette badly but that was another habit that Dick didn’t like, and even though they weren’t perfect he still wanted Dick to come home, to come back to work, which meant that today he had to be the version of himself that Dick liked the best. Sober, non-smoking, the cufflinks that Dick had bought him for his birthday peeking out from beneath his overcoat sleeves. They were gold and mother-of-pearl with little spaniel heads peering up at him, more playful than either of them usually went in for, but Dick had been smiling at him in such a shy and hopeful way as Lew opened the gift that they felt like the best thing he had ever received. 

He hovered near the doors, not so close that he’d be caught in the stream of workers making their way to their cars, but close enough that he wouldn’t miss Dick – and how could he, anyway, when Dick was tall and flame-haired and the handsomest man in every room he went into? Finally the doors opened and people began to leave; Lew looked over their heads, knowing that Dick would be towards the back of the crowds, if not the latest of all, because of that infernal conscience of his that kept him working harder than anyone else. Then, finally, ten minutes after all the rest had made their way home, a familiar figure appeared.

Lew felt himself relax at the sight of Dick and tense up at the knowledge of him at the same time. How strange that a man he knew so intimately could have such an effect on him after all this time. He felt a pang of love and a worse pang of loss, along with the absolute certainty that he had to make this right. Dick was checking his watch and then looking up into the sky in that way he always had, looking for rain, and Lew said, his voice not entirely working, “Hey,” and then louder, “Dick!”

Dick looked over at him, surprise on his face, and then – for some reason – politeness. “Can I help?” he said, coming to a halt and regarding Lew in entirely the wrong way. It was like looking at a ghost. There was nothing behind his eyes but mild interest and courtesy. 

Lew blinked at him. “Dick, we need to – hey, are you all right?”

Dick had started to look concerned. “I’m well, thank you. I’m sorry, I don’t recollect—”

This was the most fucked up game that anyone had ever played. Lew couldn’t find any more words. His throat had closed up, and he thought that he might actually be about to cry. Dick was many things, but he didn’t do shit like this. He didn’t screw with people to hurt them, unless Lew had never known him as well as he thought he did. He shook his head and waved at Dick to keep on walking, and with one final curious glance, he did. Lew felt that his feet were rooted to the spot; he watched Dick make his way to his car, the same car that had been parked in Lew’s driveway for the last four years, and he watched him get into it and drive away. 

What the hell had that been? He knew that Dick sometimes seemed cold to some people, but never to him, and never in that way – and anyway, he hadn’t been cruel, he had been as polite as he was to anyone. As polite as he was to a stranger.

Lew went back to his car and sat down behind the wheel and tightened his hands on it until his knuckles went white. Nothing made sense and it seemed as though there wasn’t anything he could do. His breathing had tightened in his chest and he felt as though it wasn’t possible to get enough air inside his lungs. He found his flask in the glove compartment and ignored Dick’s ugly checked scarf on the floor as he did so, taking a hefty swig of whisky and then another. It didn’t help as much as he wanted it to, so he decided to drive home instead. Sitting alone and drinking in a factory parking lot was more pitiful than even he would allow himself to be.

*

His house was the same as it always had been, but Lew felt the urge to comb over it anyway, to make sure that Dick had been real and that they had existed. It wasn’t hard to find evidence: there was the framed photograph of the two of them at Toccoa that he had taken down and slung into a box under the bed, and the hard stale crust of the bread that Dick liked, full of seeds that got stuck in your teeth, and the pants with the torn back pocket that Dick had meant to get mended still sitting puddled and forgotten on the floor of their closet. 

Dick wanting them to be over was fine – or it wasn’t fine, but it also wasn’t something he could bear to think about right now – but that lack of recognition had been chilling. He paced the hallway, and finished what was in his flask, and smoked so much that the air turned thick and grey. There was nobody he could talk to, because hardly anyone had _known_ ; maybe they had suspected – he was pretty sure that Blanche had an idea that something more than platonic was going on, but she lived in a world that was entirely different from most other people that Lew knew, more hedonistic and wild but more accepting as well. He wanted to talk to her, but she had gone to France to see some friend or another, and he didn’t know how to contact her.

The only other person was Harry. It had been a while since the three of them had seen each other, not since Kitty had started popping out babies with such alarming regularity that even she and Harry seemed surprised by it. Dick was better at keeping in touch with people, and Lew knew that he and Harry exchanged letters on a regular basis, because every so often Dick said things like “Harry sends his regards,” or “This week Harry wrote me five sides of paper about how great Kitty is, which I’m pretty sure is a record even for him.” They had never said anything specific to Harry, but Lew knew that he was aware of something, that he knew that Dick and Lew had chosen to set up home together in a permanent sort of a way, and that they were no longer just two old war buddies who were staying in the same house while they got reaccustomed to civilian life.

Before he thought about it long enough to put himself off the idea, he picked up the telephone and looked through his address book to find the correct number. Kitty picked up on the third ring and although she sounded as though she was in the middle of something and there was a baby cooing right next to the receiver, she still sounded glad to hear from him. “Lew! Oh, it’s been so long!” she said when she heard his voice, and then there was a moment of quiet in which there was no sound except the baby. “You need to talk to Harry,” she said, sounding worried. “I’ll get Harry.”

Something was up, he knew that then, and when Harry picked up the phone after a brief muffled conversation with Kitty, it was confirmed simply by the tone of his voice. “Lew! It’s great to hear from you,” he said, not sounding surprised, which by all probability he should have done, because frankly Lew _never_ called. 

“Harry,” Lew said, “I know it’s been a while, and I’m sorry to do this to you, and I’m especially sorry to skip out on all the pleasantries, but I need to know whether you’ve spoken to Dick. I saw him today, and something was wrong.”

There was a staticky pause, and then Harry said, sounding guarded, “What was wrong?”

“It was like he didn’t know me at all. We had a fight and I was going to make it up to him, ask him to come back to the works, and he was nice to me when he saw me, but it was though—” He stopped, trying to visualise that look in Dick’s eyes: open, polite, but with a startling lack of familiarity. “Jesus, Harry, he was acting like we’d never met.”

There was another blur of crackling as Harry sighed into the phone. “Jesus. Look, Lew, I only know the half of it, but – hey, how do you feel about a visit? I’ll come there, we’ll talk, we’ll have a few drinks, how does that sound?”

It sounded great, but also worrying. “You know, whatever you need to say to me, you can say over the phone.”

Harry’s voice was closer to the receiver now and quieter as he confessed, “I need a break, okay? Kitty’s sister’s staying this weekend, so I have a little free time – you let me visit you in New Jersey, we’ll get the whole thing straightened out, how’s that?”

“This weekend?” 

“She’s coming bright and early tomorrow morning. I can be with you by noon.”

What day was tomorrow? Was it Saturday? How was it Saturday already? “That sounds fine,” Lew said wearily. “You have the address, don’t you?”

“Sure do. Lew, get some sleep, okay? I can tell by your voice that you need some rest.”

Lew heard himself laugh; it wasn’t a pleasant sound, or the sort of laugh that made him like himself all that much. “Nice advice, Harry. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

*

Harry arrived just before noon in the end, and Lew wasn’t quite ready: he’d meant to buy groceries, and shave, and open all the curtains so his house looked less like a mausoleum. On the upside, he had managed to shower and dress and make coffee, so he felt that he hadn’t done too badly. He heard Harry’s car pull up, and peered out of the window at him as he got out. For some reason he was inspecting the mailbox, which Lew admittedly hadn’t opened in a while, and then he retrieved a fat stack of boring mail that Lew was now going to have to put on a surface somewhere, ignore, and eventually accidentally knock onto the floor and curse at.

He opened the front door and Harry came jogging up to him. It was reassuring that he was the same as ever; maybe a little less hair, maybe a few more lines because he was the proud owner of about twelve children under the age of two, but the same good old Harry Welsh. When he leaned in to hug Lew and clap him on the back he smelled a little like babies, but not in a clean, baby powder kind of way. He smelled like bread and butter crushed in small fists and a little like spit-up, but he’d come all this way so it probably wouldn’t be a great idea to inform him that he stank. 

Instead Lew tried out a smile of bonhomie on him, which apparently fell flat because Harry started eyeing him worriedly as they went into the sitting room. “Kitty says hello,” he announced as they sat down. “She also said that next time she’ll come too, and we’ll bring the kids.”

“Good lord, no thank you,” Lew said, and Harry laughed even though it hadn’t remotely been a joke. “Why are you sorting my mail for me?”

Harry had started to sift through the envelopes in his hand. “Lew, you’re a damn idiot for leaving all this out there,” he said, looking up. “Did Dick usually figure all this out?”

Lew felt himself flush. “Maybe,” he admitted. Dick had sorted the bills out and doggedly insisted that they should pay half each even though Lew had countered that he thought they should pay an equal percentage of their salaries. Dick had won, mostly because it was too much work to persuade him to change his mind. “Harry, could you just tell me why you— huh.” 

Harry had ditched most of the envelopes and come up triumphantly with one of them. “I knew you would have gotten one of these too,” he said, and Lew reached over to snatch it out of his hands. It was a thin envelope without much inside it, but it was made of thick good-quality paper, the sort of paper that his father used when he wrote to his old college cronies so that he could demonstrate to them that he was still rich. He tore the envelope open and read:

_Dear Mr Nixon,_

_Richard Winters has had you erased from his memory. Please do not mention your relationship to him again._

_Thank you,  
Kruczynski Inc_

His vision immediately blurred, and he blinked hard at the paper before reading it again. What was this? He felt as though he was shaking, like someone had taken a human-sized ice cream scoop and hollowed out his insides. He put the paper down on the couch and crossed to the bar in the corner, found a glass, filled it, drained it, filled it again.

“Nix,” Harry said softly. “Nix, come back, sit down.”

“You want a drink?” Lew’s voice sounded jagged at the edges; it felt that way too in his throat.

“No, I just—”

“No? Oh, you’ve changed. Dick get his claws into you too?” He wanted to lash out any way he could, but Harry was still just sitting there looking at him with that infernal sympathy. The fact that he wasn’t getting irritable meant that Lew really was in a shitty situation here. Lew’s head was spinning and he found himself making his way back to the couch; he put his glass on the coffee table and then dropped his head into his hands, raking his hands back through his hair. “Did you know anything about this?”

Harry sighed. “Not until we got our card in the mail. I guess they got sent out to everyone who knew the pair of you.”

“Oh.” Well, that was humiliating, everyone knowing that Lew had been so awful that Dick had been forced to get some quacks to mess around in his head to erase everything. He felt a lurch and looked quickly at Harry. “What did your card say? Did it say anything about a, uh, a—” 

“A relationship? No.” Harry shook his head. “Just that he was erasing you from his memories.”

That was something. Everyone knew that Dick hated him, but at least they didn’t know he was queer. Or part queer, anyway; that was something he had never figured out, or ever cared to figure out, and although it was one of the few things he didn’t dislike himself for, it also needed to be kept quiet. He let out a shaky breath. “Okay. Okay. There’s gotta be a way to fix this.”

Harry was already shaking his head. “Kitty called them, asked if you can get the memories put back in. I think she probably phrased it better than that. They said no. It’s to do with changing the, uh, the…” He waved a hand vaguely. “They explained how they do it. They connect wires to your head and hook you up to some kind of a machine thing. When you have memories, lights flash, and they, uh – overnight, they zap the memories away.” He blinked. “I may have gotten some of the details wrong.”

It was impossible to believe. The thought of Dick paying to have wires attached to him, deciding to undergo some bizarre procedure because he was so desperate to have Lew gone from his head. The pain of it was so agonising that he felt numb. It was like the guys with some of the worst injuries back in the war, hurting so badly that they couldn’t begin to process it, guys who were so surprised to have their guts hanging out of them that they couldn’t even scream. He realised that he’d bitten his lip so hard it was bleeding. “Jesus Christ. Harry, Dick isn’t even that kind of guy. Where did he even hear about this?”

Matter of fact, Harry said, “Well, from Liebgott, I guess.”

Lew goggled at him. “What? Liebgott – are we talking about the same guy here? From Easy?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you get his card?” Harry was frowning at him.

“I haven’t spoken to him in five years, I didn’t get a thing.” Dick wrote to all the men – some more occasionally than others, but he seemed to spend half his life in correspondence with someone or another. They’d had plenty of problems but that was never one of them – Lew hadn’t cared how many letters Dick wrote, how much time he spent thinking about other people, so long as they were together at the end of the day while he wrote those letters. Dick scribbled away at the desk while Lew sat with a book and a glass on the couch. And he’d get up, and touch Dick’s shoulder as he passed or kiss the top of his head, and Dick would look up and smile absently but fondly, and catch onto Lew’s wrist so he could press a kiss to it. The loss felt abruptly staggering, like a punch in the gut. No more evenings like that, no more nights together – no more weekend mornings either, waking with his ankle hooked over Dick’s or his arm slung over his middle before falling back to sleep – or a weekday, the smell of coffee and Dick standing in front of him, showered and shaved and dressed already, telling him gently that it was time to be up. Thousands, millions of incidental moments, all wiped away like that. He wanted to bury his face in his hands and sob like a child. 

Harry seemed to guess that he couldn’t say much else. He reached out and put a hand on Lew’s back. “I guess Dick was the one who opened the envelope. Me and Kitty got one too – asking us not to contact him again, not to mention the war, because he’d chosen to erase his memories of fighting in it.”

“The _war_?” Lew stared at Harry. “The whole damn war? What does he have in his head instead of that? A three-year gap? What’s he gonna think if someone asks him what he did in 1944? What did they say to him at this place, ‘Hey Joe, by the way, if anyone says anything, just tell ’em you were in a goddamn coma for three years’?”

Harry sighed. “I don’t know how it works, Nix. Maybe his memories of driving round Frisco driving a cab have been stretched out. Maybe he thinks he hit his head in some kind of freak accident. I don’t know.”

In a strange way, it made some sense. Lew thought back to the look on Joe Liebgott’s face in Bastogne, the emptiness of his eyes like the depths of the ocean. He had been transferred to Battalion for a short time to do some translation work with the prisoners, but there had been problems with him – Lew hadn’t encountered him much himself but there had been talk that he wasn’t great with the POWs, that his dislike of them had been too obvious and visceral. Dick had checked with him once, to make sure that Liebgott had brought the right number of prisoners back, that he hadn’t dispatched any of them on the way. And then Landsberg, of course. That changed a man. The things Liebgott had had to tell those people, his people. Sometimes you couldn’t cope with the things you saw at war. Sometimes you couldn’t cope with the things you’d done. It sounded a whole lot like Joseph Liebgott hadn’t been able to cope with either, and so he’d decided to do something about it. 

“It’s not the worst way out,” Lew said slowly. “Maybe it was that or a gun.”

“Shit,” Harry said, and fell silent for a second. “You’re right. Do you ever…” He took a breath. “Do you dream about it?”

Lew shrugged a shoulder. “Sure. Sometimes.” That plane spiralling downwards, a fiery tomb. What he didn’t tell people was that he’d landed not so far from that plane, and that he’d been able to smell burning flesh mixed in with fuel and fire. He dreamed of writing those letters home the following day, his eyes blurred with whisky, Harry and Ron and Lip playing poker in the next room, Dick sitting at the other end of Lew’s table, pretending that he needed to do paperwork, and in actuality keeping him company. He dreamed of Bastogne, of snow scattering, of pockmarks of red and black on white. Sometimes he had pleasant dreams, dreams of Dick’s body cutting through the water in Austria, the clean pale line of him. Of course, that was no longer a good dream. The few good memories of Europe would be tainted now. 

“Did Dick?” Harry asked.

Dick sucking in a breath and sitting upright halfway through the night, streaming with sweat, not knowing where he was. Lew had stroked his hair to calm him down and murmured comforting words into his ear, _it’s okay, it’s okay, you’re safe, I’m here, I’m here, I’ve got you._ Lew shrugged. “Yeah. Sometimes. Do you?”

“Yeah, a lot.” He was frowning hard at the floor like he didn’t want to make eye contact. “I hate it, I hate waking Kitty up. Once I woke the baby up. We laughed about it, said he deserved it for waking us up all those other nights.” Harry was smiling, but it was more humourless than usual. “Kitty’s great, but there are things I don’t tell her. I don’t think she wants to know.”

It was the first time Lew had ever heard him say anything about Kitty that could be construed as remotely negative, but it didn’t seem like the right time to point that out. Instead he said, “Tell me about it. Once my sister asked me how it was but then she changed her mind the second I opened my mouth.”

“I always thought you were lucky,” Harry ventured, “you and Dick could talk about—”

“Yeah. It did us a lot of good, evidently.” He could hear himself, unpleasant and flat and sarcastic, and hated it but also couldn’t find it within himself to do anything about it. “Jesus Christ, Harry, what the hell do I do now, huh? Dick’s gone, what do I do next?”

“I don’t know, buddy. I don’t know.” Harry’s eyes were narrowed in sympathetic pain and he put an arm around Lew’s shoulders. “Listen, I thought maybe I could go and see Dick. See if he’s okay. What do you think?”

Lew seized onto that pathetically quickly. “Yeah, all right. And you’ll tell me what he says?”

“Sure,” Harry said, and gripped his shoulder. “I’ll take the guy out today, squeeze something out of him. Then I’ll come back here.”

*

It was arguably one of the worst afternoons of Lew’s life, and considering that he’d once spent an afternoon crawling underneath barbed wire through pig entrails while machine gun fire ratcheted overhead and Sobell shrieked at everyone in sight, that was saying something. He drank, lit and forgot about endless cigarettes, walked up and down his porch, and tried to ignore the sad stringy leaves of the plants that Dick had put in earlier that year. He examined the little card until his fingers had smudged the ink on it. Kruczynski Inc. What kind of company was that, anyway? Who was willing to get inside someone else’s head and swish their dirty fingers around and take their memories away? He felt bitterly sad that Joe Liebgott had been driven towards doing something so drastic, and increasingly more furious that Dick had made that decision. Had their life together been so bad? Had Lew made him so unhappy? Joe had chosen to erase the deaths of friends, bloody combat, agonising pain, and Dick had chosen to erase eight years of what could be described as love. Did that mean there was nothing good that could come from their relationship? No good memories worth saving? 

He tried to stay hopeful until Harry got back from his late lunch with Dick, looking tired and smelling of beer. He sat opposite from Lew in what had been Dick’s chair until not long ago and rubbed his eyes exhaustedly and said, “You wouldn’t believe it. I asked him questions. He doesn’t remember a thing.”

Lew felt as though the foundations of his world had shifted. “Nothing?”

“Oh, he remembers Toccoa, and training, and England – he remembers the war, he remembers me, he asked after Kitty and the kids – he even remembers their names.” He gave Lew a significant look. 

So what if Lew couldn’t remember the names or quantity of the children in Harry’s little brood? That didn’t seem like the point. He waved his hand dismissively, desperate for more information. “What else?”

Harry let out a breath. “Lew, it’s bizarre. He remembers situations, he just doesn’t remember you in them. I asked him where he’d been living until he moved – I saw his new apartment, you’d hate it, it’s the sort of place where spiders go to die – and he said, _Oh, nearby_ , and _it was fine, sure, some big house_. I asked him about that big wine cellar in Germany and he just said something about me trying to make him drink champagne.”

“Okay. Well. Shit.” Lew scrabbled for something to hold onto, some note of positivity, and found absolutely nothing, which made sense because he knew he wasn’t the sort of person who did optimism well, and now wasn’t the best time to start. He breathed, “Shit, Harry,” and Harry said, “I know,” and looked agonisingly sad for him. Lew buried his head in his hands, not for the first time that day. So that was it – the time they had kissed on the porch as rain fell outside was gone, the peace of lying in their bed in each other’s arms had vanished. If Lew was the only one who remembered it, had it really happened? Did it matter any more?

He said, “God, I must have hurt him really bad,” into his hands and felt the couch cushions shift as Harry moved over to sit with him. “I’m sorry, Lew,” he said, his hand rough and uncertain on Lew’s shoulder, and Lew managed to find it within himself to say, “Yeah. Thanks, Harry. Thanks,” with some degree of sincerity, just like Dick would have wanted him to.

*

Lew was not surprised that the next few days were abysmal. Since Dick had left, everything had been shitty, but he managed to startle even himself when he got so drunk he pissed the bed and woke up with dried vomit acting as a surprisingly effective glue that had attached his face to his pillow. It was because he’d mixed his drinks, he told himself. If you mixed your drinks, this was what happened: you woke up too late to hold your piss and didn’t even notice when you threw up half a hotdog and some graham crackers (nutritional dinners were another thing he was not great at) into your blankets. There was something deeply unsettling about being a grown man and scrubbing your own urine out of your mattress. As he was doing it he thought, _This has happened before_ , and knew without a doubt that Dick had done this for him on a blurry night or two that he had blocked out of his memory. 

Some things, he was glad that Dick had forgotten.

But then there were other things that made no sense. He knew that Dick had not liked the drinking, and he understood that, but Dick had gone to the liquor store for him after buying groceries countless times, had uncomplainingly slid bottles of Vat 69 into the trunk of his car amidst the broccoli and the milk and the bags of apples. Dick had given him a wine cellar in Europe, and hidden his bottles for him in his foot locker. Dick had opened bottles of wine for him before dinner when Lew was busy making sure the sauce didn’t burn on the stove, and then he hadn’t said a word when Lew finished the bottle before dessert. Lew drank too much, his father drank too much, it was a family trait, and he knew it was not exactly a selling point of his, but if it was such an issue he found himself irate that Dick had barely mentioned it outside disapproving glances and that he’d just kept going along with it.

He also knew that the drinking wasn’t the only issue. Dick didn’t like to be around crowds of people and then he sulked when Lew went alone to New York to see his old friends even though he’d opted out of joining him. He didn’t like Blanche and didn’t do a good job of hiding it, and when Lew asked him what the issue was, he’d said only that she was “flighty” and then refused to elaborate. Dick thought that his own mother was the only person in the world who was any real good, and refused to see that whenever Lew was around she treated him coldly and as though she didn’t really want him to be there, and then he got tight-lipped and silently upset when Lew made reluctant noises about having her to stay. It hadn’t been perfect between them. But nothing ever was.

Lew could only sleep when he was drunk, and when he was drunk all he wanted to do was sleep. He could not wake up for work, and hung up the phone on his dad when he called to berate him about missing a meeting. He thought about everything that had gone wrong with Dick and then couldn’t help but think about everything that had gone right, and that was even more painful. The fact he’d never listen to Dick humming tunelessly as he fried eggs again felt like a death sentence. They would never get that dog, they would never buy the beach house they had always talked about, he would never get to take Dick back to Paris to show him what it was like there when there wasn’t a war on and to convince him, maybe, that France wasn’t so bad after all. 

He looked again and again at that little piece of card from Kruczynski Inc. The corners peeled and the ink was fading away. On the back, a telephone number was printed under the company name and he found himself dialling it over and over again but hanging up almost immediately. What would he say to them, anyway? He had an insane vision of storming up to their front desk and demanding that they put Dick’s memories back into his head, with a funnel up his nose if necessary, or trickled in through his ears.

He sat by the telephone on the floor in the hallway, his legs stretched out on the floor. He could hear rain falling outside and the air inside felt strangely grey. He had told the housekeeper not to come again until he okayed it, although of course he was still paying her. He thought that probably his house smelled bad, of alcohol and his unwashed body, and he didn’t particularly want to subject another human being to it. He was wearing shorts and an old undershirt and a bathrobe that both he and Dick had flung on at various times until it had belonged to neither of them and both of them at the same time. His bare feet were cold, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to find his slippers. 

Idly, he dialled the number for Kruczynski Inc yet again, and was distracted when a bird flew abruptly into a window. “My God,” he said, and dropped the receiver. The grass wasn’t cracked, but a small sparrow lay dead on the ground. This didn’t seem to bode particularly well, and neither did the fact that he could hear a voice, small and tinny, coming from—

The phone. He’d got through to them by mistake, and although instinctively he almost hung up, instead he grabbed the receiver and said, “Hello – hi, I’m sorry about that. Hi.”

The woman on the other end didn’t sound perturbed in the slightest. “No problem at all. You’re speaking to Janie at Kruczynski Inc. How can I help you today?”

“That’s a great question, Janie,” Lew said, more grimly than he’d intended. 

Luckily Janie didn’t seem to be easily put off, and said, “Did you want to book an appointment, sir?”

Lew looked at his ratty bathrobe, and the dead sparrow, and thought, _This can’t go on_. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, please.”

**_yesterday_ **

Kruczynski Inc was an unassuming-looking office on the bottom floor of a small block. On the middle floor there was a company that made pens, and on the top floor there was a business that sold ladies’ stockings. Lew imagined Dick standing there outside the front door and being reassured by the legitimacy of the other businesses in the building, deciding that Kruczynski Inc was a decent place after all. He would have liked the fact that it didn’t seem boastful from outside, that there were no lit-up signs or gaudy logos. Lew liked that too, because to him it meant that the business was successful enough to not have to advertise itself. It was the sort of arrogance he could appreciate.

The waiting room was bright white and immaculate, and he was reminded horribly of the hospital in which his mother had died. Then he felt guilty about being more torn up about Dick leaving than the death of his mother, which meant that across the room, Janie’s smile turned from enquiring to sympathetic behind the desk as he stood stock still and felt unable to move. 

Finally his legs started to work again and he moved across to the counter. “Sorry about that,” he said, and lied: “Old war injury. Gets me sometimes. I have an appointment – Lewis Nixon?”

“Of course.” She looked at her schedule and said, “Dr Barish will be with you shortly, if you’d like to take a seat.”

He did, and lit a cigarette. Across the room there was a pale man holding a cardboard box with a photograph of a boy in uniform peeking out of it. He looked like a replacement, whoever the kid was – too young, as though he didn’t even shave yet. There was a woman a couple seats away, holding a tiny pink knitted cardigan in her hands, running her fingers over and over again across its pearly buttons. Lew didn’t want to think too hard about that one. 

He was called into Dr Barish’s office a minute early, which – again – was the sort of thing that would have pleased Dick, who was of the opinion that on time was too late. He had expected to see some evil scientist with insane electrified curls and wire-framed spectacles who looked like he’d just been dug up, but as it turned out, Dr Barish was around his father’s age, with eyes that were considerably more tired and kind than Stanhope’s. He stood, gestured Lew towards a chair, and said, “How can I help you?”

“Listen, I – I have a friend who came here,” Lew said. He felt half-desperate but so exhausted at the same time that his words were coming out quiet and firm, even though he felt they should be running together, that he should be raging and shouting. “We had an argument. You wiped away all his memories of us.”

Dr Barish’s expression had become a little warier. “I’m afraid I can’t discuss my previous clients with you,” he said lightly.

“I know, I know.” There was a headache behind Lew’s eyes that grew every time he blinked. The bright light in Dr Barish’s office was too much for him; he was hungover, although that was pretty obvious these days, and he was tired despite spending too much time in bed. “I just – I want to know how it goes. I was close with him for eight years. What did he forget exactly? Say, if I went to the beach with him, would he forget the entire trip or just being there with me?”

Dr Barish took off his glasses, and started to polish them. “It’s different for every patient,” he said. “If his memories of the beach are associated solely with you, then yes, he may well forget the entire trip.”

Lew’s throat had started to tighten. “All right,” he said, “and say – say I lived with him. For five years. Would he forget our house, or just living there with me?”

Dr Barish was working on what was apparently a particularly stubborn spot on one of the lenses of his glasses. “As I said, it’s different for everybody. It’s unlikely that a patient would entirely forget a house – it’s more likely that he might forget the time he spent with you there, rather than the structure itself. Does that make sense to you?”

Strangely, it did. Lew found himself nodding. The pressure in his throat was stronger now, and in his nose too. He felt as though he was going to cry, and held the feeling back as forcefully as he could. “We met in the war,” he said. “He was a hero. He did incredible things. He wouldn’t forget that, would he?”

Dr Barish slipped his glasses back onto his face and said, even more gently, “No. No, he wouldn’t forget that.”

It was a relief and not a relief at the same time. Dick had lost their peaceful dinnertimes every night, he had lost the times that Lew had slipped into his lap when he was writing letters to distract him by kissing him, he had lost the time they sat out under the stars together on the first night they moved into their house. It was so empty back there that they’d felt just fine sitting on garden chairs and holding hands and passing a bottle of apple cider back and forth. He’d kept leading his men into battle, he’d kept the nightmares, he’d kept the blood and guts and pain. Lucky, lucky him. “Okay,” Lew said. “Okay – I guess that’s good.” 

There was silence. Dr Barish kept looking at him with that frustratingly calm expression. It reminded him of Dick in a way, how he’d sit and wait and listen when Lew was pissed about something and ranting, until he’d talked himself out. It had worked for a while, and then it had been annoying because he felt like Dick was being holier than thou. Luckily he hadn’t reached that stage of familiarity with Dr Barish yet, so he managed not to snap at him. Instead he just heaved a sigh and said, “I don’t know what to do about any of this.”

He thought about the future, about knowing for the rest of his life that Dick had chosen to erase him. Knowing that he had found love and then lost it in such a savage way didn’t feel like the sort of thing he could live with, just like Joe Liebgott hadn’t been able to live with his war and the things he’d done during it. Part of him wanted to go back to bed and to grieve the end of his relationship, but a little way across town Dick was living his life in cheerful oblivion. It felt screwed up that Dick could leave and be happy, and meanwhile Lew was left in this pain that dragged every part of his body downward and left his mind seething unhappily. He wasn’t sure that he could face the entirety of the rest of his life in this state, this impotent fury, this unbearable sorrow.

He looked at Dr Barish and said, “You know what? Scratch that. When’s your next appointment?”

*

There was a space that afternoon. Dr Barish had told him to go home and to gather every single thing that was connected to Dick, and then to come back again. Dick hadn’t left much behind, because he’d always been economical with his possessions and didn’t own all that much to start with. Lew had bought almost everything in the house, and in fact the house itself. Dick had always been adamant about paying his way when it came to bills and groceries, but Lew thought meanly that he’d been just fine with sitting back and letting Lew be the person who purchased things like rugs and saucepans and egg timers. Maybe Dick had had the inkling he wouldn’t be around to use those things for all that long.

He looked through the dressers and closets, gathering up Dick’s pants with the ripped pocket and the reading glasses he refused to admit he needed and the old lumpy knitted hat that Ann had made for him that was shoved in the corner of Lew’s old trunk from Yale (he’d hidden it there because Dick insisted on wearing it far too often, and he looked unacceptable in it, like his head was made of marshmallows). In the kitchen he filled a box with Dick’s oatmeal and the peach preserves he’d brought back from his mother’s house, and threw his half-eaten pint of strawberry ice cream in the trash. In the living room he hunted for their Ella Fitzgerald record, the one they had danced to so many times, and could find it nowhere. Instead he took along a leaflet from a show of hers that they had attended together, at a small basement club in Manhattan. Dick had looked dubious and uncomfortable to be there, until she’d opened her mouth and started to sing.

He found all the old photographs, ripped out pages from his diaries and his appointment book, used a thick black pen to cross out the names of Dick’s family in his address book. He slung the photographs into the boxes too, except for one, in which they were wearing their PT kit back at Toccoa and beaming sun-blinded up into the camera. He and Dick had kept that photograph framed on the mantelpiece next to the pictures of Dick’s family, which had of course vanished with him. Some sort of tightness inside his chest prevented him from throwing that photograph out too. Instead he wrapped it in Dick’s old oilskin and buried it in the back yard, beneath the lawn chairs where they had sat together. Maybe someday someone would buy the house and dig it up, and wonder who those happy young men were, and what they were doing now, and if they were still smiling side by side.

*

It was a strange process. He lugged the boxes back to the clinic and sat in a chair in Dr Barish’s office. He felt strange and discombobulated, and realised that it had been a while since he’d had a drink. He took his cigarettes out, offered one to the doctor, who declined, and lit one himself before taking his flask out as well. He was paying for this; he could do damn well whatever he wanted. 

The doctor pulled a sheaf of papers out of a drawer and said, “Are you sure about this?”

He’d never been less sure of anything in his life before, but he nodded anyway. Apparently what he had to do was to write out the reasons he wanted to erase Dick on those papers, and as many memories as he could think of. The doctor left the room so that he could do so, and then the silence felt like the walls were closing in on him. He was surrounded by those damn boxes, which didn’t help at all. He took a steadying slug of whisky and looked at the paper. _My name is Lewis Nixon_ , he wrote, and stared at his name; then he added, _and I want to erase Dick Winters._

After their names, he left the tip of his pen sitting on the paper for so long that it turned into a large black unsightly blotch, but he was pretty sure they’d cleaned up worse messes in these offices than that. He thought about Dick’s face, the sweet familiarity of it, and the blankness in his eyes the last time they’d met. He thought about the tight recriminatory line of Dick’s mouth, and the way he’d started going to bed earlier and earlier, like he was trying to get away from Lew in the evenings. He thought of his half-smiles in Austria and the deep satisfaction on his face when they’d moved out to the country, the way Dick had looked out over the expanse of land beyond the new house and Lew had been able to look at nothing but Dick himself. He thought his heart was about to choke its way up his throat and out onto the desk with the pain of it. 

He set the pen on the paper again, and he wrote: _He stopped loving me_. Then he took a breath, and continued.

*

It wrung him out, writing those pages, worse than any last-minute paper he’d ever scribbled at college, worse even than the letters he’d sent to countless boys’ mothers during the war. He wrote, _He didn’t care enough to tell me what the problem was_ , and _He wanted to demonstrate all the time that he was a better person than me_ , and _He was tight with his money_ , and _He was boring_ , and _He was arrogant_ , and _He wanted to save me. When he found out that he couldn’t, he stopped caring._

He still felt shaky and as though he’d been cored out like an apple as he followed Dr Barish into the adjoining room. He sat in the chair there and let himself be hooked up to a number of wires that were attached to a machine in the corner. It felt like sticking plaster attaching them to his head and his chest and his wrists, smelled like it too, and he thought of his old nanny putting it over his knees when he fell over as a kid. His mother had just handed him off to her whenever he got hurt (why was that? if he ever had a kid – and then he remembered that he did have a kid, and he’d handed him off to his ex-wife and her new husband for Michael’s entire life, so he really couldn’t criticise his mother for anything ever again).

Dr Barish carted the boxes in too, and stood there looking flustered and out of breath. Apparently all the stuff in the boxes would be disposed afterwards, whatever that meant. Overnight, the memories would vanish, and in the morning he’d be fresh and new again, or as fresh and new as he could be made at this battered and odd point in his life. There were forms that Dr Barish made Lew sign, and he asked two more times if he was sure. “I am,” Lew said each time, his voice stronger now. He felt more certain. He couldn’t live with this, and anyway, if Dick was happy to toss it all away, he’d erase him right back. He tried out a smile, and said, “All right, doc. It’s time to nuke my brains out.”

Dr Barish paused, looking tentative, and said, “I need to make sure that you understand that no part of your brain will be removed during the procedure.”

Lew blinked at him, and wished for a fervent moment that he could tell Dick about this later, so Dick could make his _Why is everyone except you and me absolutely absurd_ face, and they could laugh together. Then he said, “I understand. I was just kidding around.”

There apparently wasn’t much space for kidding around at Kruczynski Inc, but that was okay, because after a couple minutes he didn’t feel like kidding around at all. The doctor held up the items he’d brought in, one at a time; some sort of magic happened, the machine bleeped, the item was discarded, and another was held up. The items of their life together felt pathetic and small: the green sweater Dick had given him for Christmas two years ago that he had never particularly liked, the playbill for the time Blanche had taken them to a show on Broadway for Dick’s birthday, the little stuffed dog Dick had brought home for him until they got a real puppy, the half-empty package of oatmeal cookies Dick insisted he liked and then barely ever ate, the Easy photographs that Dick had left behind, although seemingly only the ones in which Lew featured. A jar, half-full of sand and broken shells from the beach the first time they’d been to Spring Lake together. A jigsaw puzzle of the English countryside that Dick had been sent from his friends in Aldbourne, one of his old army manuals, the antique glass bowl they kept fruit in that they had purchased together one Saturday afternoon right after Dick had first moved to New Jersey. He remembered the triumph they had both felt at selecting something for their shared home, the way they had set it on the kitchen counter together to stare gleefully at it. Dick had carefully placed exactly one apple and one bruised-looking pear in it along with a small handful of shrivelled-up grapes, the only fruit they’d had in the house, and it had looked so pathetic that they’d found themselves laughing helplessly and holding onto each other’s arms.

Tears came to his eyes. They overflowed. Slowly, the boxes emptied. The last thing was Dick’s reading glasses and Lew thought, _But what if he needs those_ , before banishing that thought. He’d left them behind. It was Dick’s own damn fault. He said, “He pretends he doesn’t need them, but he does. He squints when he reads the small print in the newspaper, and he gets headaches when he reads for too long.” Dick had never admitted to it, but Lew knew exactly the face he made when he had a headache. His voice was raw as he finished: “He’s a damn fool.”

Home, then. Driving through dusk with glassy eyes. It had been a long time since he’d been this tired, but when he got back to his house he choked down the sleeping pill that the doctor had given him anyway along with a mouthful of whisky, before climbing into bed. He thought of Dick as he closed his eyes, the beloved fact of his face, his wry smile, the touch of his hands, the sound of his voice; and before sleep finally took him, his last conscious thought was: _I need to keep him. I want him back._

**_last night_ **

He is driving back from the city, down interminable dark roads; the smell of fall is in the air, crushed smoky leaves and bewildered grey skies. He is half-drunk, which is not unusual, but will almost certainly get him told off when he gets home, if he gets home, if Dick is there when he gets home, because Dick went to Lancaster to see his sour-faced mother and irritatingly precocious sister, and Lew has no idea when he’ll be back.

The lights are off in the house. When he opens the front door the dark space in front of him gapes like a broken tooth. His footsteps echo in the emptiness of his own home. Dick’s overcoat is gone from the rack, and his rain boots from the porch, and his light summer jacket too; when Lew goes into the living room the photographs are gone from the mantel. His heart pounds and bitterness floods his mouth as he scrambles up the stairs into their bedroom and flings open the closet to find empty hangers, empty drawers in the dresser, empty shelves in the bathroom cabinet, and he finds his voice raising in the darkness, his voice calling Dick’s name over and over and over, and he does not come—

_Gone._

October. The last fight. Dick’s home from work and mad (again) because Lew promised to follow him into the office but never showed up (again), never showered, never even got out of bed, burned a hole through the blanket when he fell asleep again with a cigarette in his hand (again). He leaps up when Dick’s car pulls into the driveway, pulls on the ratty old bathrobe and slippers and tries to look busy when Dick comes up the stairs smelling of cold air and metal and rain. 

“You said you’d come into work,” Dick says and asks, “Are you sick?” in the tone of voice that implies, _You’d better be sick._

He reminds Lew so much of all the old schoolmasters who he hated that it makes his skin crawl. “Yes, I’m sick,” he lies rebelliously, watching Dick’s mouth curl up at the corner. Then they’re in the bedroom and Dick’s picking up the whisky bottle that Lew slung between the bed and the nightstand, turning it over in his hands. There’s a pencil mark that Lew didn’t notice and Dick says, “You drank this much today, you drank _this much_ ,” and Lew says, “You were keeping track of me? How the fuck dare you,” and Dick throws down the bottle, which bounces harmlessly on the bed, and spits out, “Don’t curse at me,” and Lew says, “I’ll do whatever the hell I want in my house,” and Dick’s eyes turn into blue diamonds, hard and cold, and he says, “Damn right it’s your house.”

The air ripples. It’s almost gone. It changes. Lew takes a breath. “Hey,” he says, “hey, don’t leave,” and Dick says sharply, “I’m not,” and Lew says, “But you will. This is it, Dick. This is the last time we ever saw each other.” Dick stares at him, detached already, but there’s something in his expression that softens minutely and—

_Gone._

He’s sad. He’s just sad, and he doesn’t know what to do about it; Dick’s at work and there’s a meeting he should be at but the thought of going to it, showering and shaving, putting on a suit, is more than he can bear, going into the office, smiling at people (smiling at people? who smiles at people? he doesn’t even know how) – but he got up at least, he put some chicken in the oven for dinner, poured some whisky, drank some whisky, poured and drank more whisky, poured some wine, drank some wine, felt marginally better. But Dick isn’t home, it’s dark out and Dick isn’t home, and then he _is_ home, there’s his voice saying “Jesus Christ!” which is rare enough that Lew’s body manages to get itself up from the chair where he’s been slumped in the living room.

“Lew, you didn’t smell the smoke?” His worried face swimming in front of Lew’s.

“I didn’t. Sorry, I…” He finds himself slumping against the kitchen doorway. The back door is wide open and on the grass just outside it there’s a chicken in a roasting tin turned into cinders. He takes a couple of steps forward and falls gratefully down into a chair.

“The day I had today, your dad, Lew, in my role it isn’t fair I should be dealing with him like this, you’re my _boss_ , that’s your job, not mine, and I know it’s just a technical thing at this point but if I’m managing the employees, and your dad treats those people badly, what can I do? I can only smooth it over between them so much. I can only persuade him so far. What am I expected to do? Ask him not to come in any more? Ask him to let you take over? The idea of that…”

Lew doesn’t remember Dick ever saying as much before in one breath. His face is down on the kitchen table now, resting on his arms. “I had a bad day,” he tells the table.

“You and me both,” Dick snaps. “You know you remind me of your dad sometimes?”

That gets his attention. “And you remind me of your mom,” Lew says, lifting his head up before letting it fall again. “That sharp-faced, uptight old bitch.”

Silence. Footsteps. A door slams—

_Gone._

Dinner out, on a Saturday night. Dick’s taking his time over his soup even though Lew’s already done with his scallops and raring to go for the next course. Dick’s blowing on each mouthful like burning his tongue would be the worst thing that ever happened to him, and Lew thinks he might just be doing it purely to piss him off. On one side of them there’s a couple talking, hand-in-hand over the table, staring into each other’s eyes. They were like that once upon a time, Lew expects, although not in public, never in public. He bumps Dick’s knee under the table with his own and Dick shoots him an accusing look and shifts backward a little. 

On the other side of the room there’s a family with two little kids, all blond curls and good table manners. The boy looks around the same age as Michael was in the photograph that Kathy sent last Christmas, which makes him about five. Lew can’t seem to think of anything to say to Dick and so he watches the family instead, the way the mom and dad are communicating wordlessly, the mom mopping sauce off the little girl’s face – she’s younger than the boy, probably too young to be out at dinner this late – as the dad talks animatedly to the little boy. It makes something in his chest pang and he doesn’t know why, whether it’s loss or want or envy. “Hey, Dick,” he says, “do you think—”

He doesn’t know what exactly he’s going to say, whether he’s about to suggest having Michael for a visit, or doing something wild like getting Dick’s church to find some orphan in the area who needs a place to stay, but Dick follows his gaze flatly and shakes his head. “You already have a kid you don’t see. And do you really think—”

He looks at Lew’s wine glass and hisses out a sigh. “Never mind.”

“No, go on,” Lew says, already prickling with defensive irritation. “Go ahead. I want to hear this. I can tell it’s going to be good.”

Dick’s mouth twists. “Fine. Do you really think that in your state you could take care of a child?”

“In my state?” His voice rises and the couple beside them are starting to look worried. “And what kind of state exactly would that be?”

Dick’s looking down at his bowl again. “Forget it.”

“Screw you,” Lew mutters. He refills his glass. Dick looks contemptuously at it and Lew says, “I’m erasing you. And I’m glad. I can’t wait for you to be gone—"

_Gone._

They’re walking together on the beach in Spring Lake. It’s midsummer, and the last time, and Dick screws his face up as he looks up into the cornflower-blue sky. The lines around his eyes are getting deeper; they’re getting older together, and when Dick catches Lew staring at him he smiles and says, “What?” and Lew says, “Nothing,” and Dick raises his eyebrows like, _Yeah, yeah, I know your game._

It’s a good day. Lew’s sober and Dick’s happy about it, and the sand is golden and sun-baked. The water glitters blue for once instead of grey, and Dick’s nose is already sunburned. He’ll peel later, and complain about it, and Lew will find the old tube of aloe and daub some ointment on there for him before bed. They find a place to lay their towels out up the beach where there isn’t anyone else around, and Dick strips down to his trunks with his usual military efficiency. “I’m getting out there for a little while,” he says, nodding down at the water before padding down to its edge. He wades right in as though the sea’s as warm as a bath.

Lew remembers this day. He watched him swim out and then in again, his coppery hair bright in the sun. He dozed and Dick came up to him and shook cold saltwater over him and laughed and Lew pretended to growl at him and then Dick lay down on his towel and they luxuriated in the sun together until they were both pink-skinned and hungry for lunch, when they ate sweaty cheese sandwiches that Dick had packed for them that morning. The memory is shimmering around the edges, hazy, Dick’s head in the ocean fading in and out, and in a panic Lew finds himself running down to the water’s edge, into the sea, as deep as his knees and then his waist and then his shoulders, looking for Dick, but he’s gone, he’s vanished, Dr Barish has caught up to this memory in his head and it’s going. And then there’s Dick in front of him, handsome and frowning, treading water, and Lew says, “I thought you’d gone!”

“I’m still here,” Dick says, and smiles before dipping his head underwater again. Lew reaches for him and comes up with nothing but armfuls of saltwater, alone in the ocean, and says “Dick? Where are you? Dick? This isn’t fair! Where are you? Don’t leave me—"

_Gone._

Brought a bottle of wine, drank it all himself, and isn’t that just typical? But Christmas with the Winters family isn’t as swell as Dick made it sound, because if you’re not a member of the Winters clan then organised fun is not, as it turns out, all that much fun after all. _Come with me this year,_ Dick invited him, _I know you don’t want to spend time with your dad, come and stay with my mom with me_ , and at the last minute Lew agreed, hopped optimistically in that car with him on Christmas Eve and stopped off on the way to buy big bottles of perfume for Dick’s mom and sister as gifts, got them professionally wrapped and all, even though Dick looked pained beside him and said it wasn’t necessary.

And turns out Dick was right, because first thing on Christmas morning Mrs Winters eyes her bottle like she’s never seen anything like it before, and then she snatches Ann’s right out of her hands like Lew’s trying to poison her with Chanel. She says thank you with an uncomfortable smile that means she doesn’t want the gifts at all, and Lew feels stupid and flashy and small, which makes sense because he knows that’s exactly the sort of person he really is.

He finishes the wine before dinner even starts, and wanders upstairs for a few nips of whisky too, just to make the day run more smoothly and make the distrust in Mrs Winters’ eyes less palpable. By the time the food’s on the table he’s half-wasted and his head’s swimming. It’s hard to force down more than a few bites of Dick’s mom’s goose and half a potato. Across the table Dick’s sitting in his dad’s old seat and looking tight-lipped, and after the plates have been cleared Lew has to excuse himself so he can go outside ‘for a cigarette’ and vomit red wine into the snow. _I hate myself_ , he thinks, _I hate myself and they hate me_ , and he heaves again—

_Gone._

The living room in their new house, the fire blazing and snow falling outside, his hand in Dick’s and their bodies tight together. Ella’s singing from the record player and his nose is pressed against the side of Dick’s neck to inhale his clean scent, Dick’s arm is around his waist holding him tight, and they’re so close, moving in time with each other. He runs his hand up and down Dick’s back and revels in the familiarity of his body, the line of his spine, the muscles of his shoulders, the short hair on the back of his neck. “I love you,” Dick whispers against the side of his face like a prayer, “please just try—"

_Gone._

“Home time,” Lew says. He sticks his head into Dick’s office and leans against the doorframe as alluringly as possible. If he’s honest, it probably isn’t all that alluring because it isn’t as though he’s about to do a damn striptease at the factory, but it isn’t as though they’ve ever had to go to much trouble to turn each other on. 

Even still, it definitely isn’t working, because Dick just looks up and says, “It isn’t even five.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Lew, I’m not done working.”

“So come in early tomorrow. Or bring it home.” He grins and says, quieter now, “Although I might distract you.”

Dick sighs at him disapprovingly. “Go home if you want, Lew, but right now I’m not coming with you.”

“Fine. Jeez. Sometimes you can be boring, you know that, Dick?” Lew turns to go, ignoring the faint flash of hurt in Dick’s eyes until his conscience tugs at him and he has to turn back. But Dick is gone, the memory is over, the office is fading, the walls are crumbling, and—

_Gone._

Their old house. Surrounded by boxes, ready to move out to the country. Dick’s chopping vegetables and humming some song that doesn’t appear to have much of a tune and Lew’s sitting perched on the worktop. Outside the trees are fading away, the neighbours’ houses, the streetlights disappearing one by one, the boxes disintegrating, and there’s Dick still there cutting up carrots like it’s going out of fashion. “We have to go,” Lew says, leaping off the counter, and Dick looks over his shoulder and says, “Huh?” 

Lew grabs onto his arm and he drops the knife, which like everything else fades into nothingness. “Come with me,” Lew says, and drags him to the back of the house, into the back yard, where the fences are vanishing, the trees collapsing. “We have to run,” he says to Dick, even as he feels his forearm turn into air—

_Gone._

“Did you hear me?” Lew says, and Dick says, “What?” 

They’re in Manhattan, in the back of a taxi. Dick’s wearing his second-best suit, not the one he wears to go to weddings, which he keeps carefully and reverently in the back of his closet, but the slightly more fashionable one he wears when he wants to impress people. Lew is duly impressed by him, his combed-back hair, the sharp lines of his clean-shaven jaw, his snowy white cuffs and his intelligent callused hands. He’s frowning in that way that means he’s a little anxious but doesn’t want to show it, so he decided to look stern instead. It’s something that Lew always found unbearably sweet, but he finds himself slightly frustrated by it tonight. He nudges Dick’s shoulder and says, “For Christ’s sake, cheer up and trust me.”

“I do trust you,” Dick mutters. “These places just aren’t my sort of thing, you know that.”

“I know. But I promise you’ll like this. I promise, Dick. Come on, let’s get out.” The car has pulled to a stop outside a non-descript doorway and Lew leans over to pay the driver, adding an extra tip because he’s feeling flush and he wants to make tonight a good one.

The club is smoky and dark and Dick’s already narrowing his eyes to see through the gloom. Lew cuts through the crowds, gets himself a whisky and Dick a club soda. Dick sips at it like he’s glad to have something to do with his hands. At one end of the room there’s a small stage where there’s a guy playing a double bass, another guy on piano, another on drums and a fourth breathing out a gorgeous bluesy tune on a saxophone that makes Lew feel like heaven’s trickling down his spine. Lew lights a cigarette and feels secretly glad that there are so many people there, because it means he can put a hand on the base of Dick’s spine without anyone noticing, on that little dip he likes just above the curve of his ass. Dick leans imperceptibly closer and says, “Hey,” and Lew says, “Hey,” right back at him. They smile at each other, knowing that they’d kiss if they could.

They take a seat together at a table near the front that Lew secured with another unfathomably huge tip that he handed over without Dick noticing. Dick drinks his soda and leans over to say, “It’s too loud in here. I hate not being able to talk to you.”

“You can talk all you want! You just gotta shout it a little, baby,” Lew says, and Dick gives him the sort of complicated look that he recognises but has never been able to pin down. Lew smiles at him and leans in so he can say right into Dick’s ear, “And honestly, I don’t hate having an excuse to sit closer to you.”

Dick smiles at that, warm and affectionate, and touches Lew’s knee under the table, a fleeting moment that nonetheless sends a pleasurable shiver down Lew’s spine, even now, even after all these years. He loves places like this, but sometimes dragging Dick out of the house is more trouble than it’s worth. He was better at feigning interest years ago; these days he isn’t so bothered about what Lew might think of him, so he’s more likely to look grouchy for an hour before deciding to go home early whether or not Lew wants to go with him. But to Lew there’s something vibrant and exciting about this room full of women with lipstick-slashed smiles and men in suits a thousand times sharper than anything either he or Dick would pick out. He taps out a rhythm on Dick’s thigh under the table and sips his drink, and Dick edges his chair a little closer, and then the lights go down.

On the stage, a spotlight; and Lew’s been waiting for this for weeks, has heard about this woman and her vocal cords made of pure gold, and his heart’s racing, ready to hear her sing in person. She steps onto the stage, her skin glowing under the lights and her hair piled on the top of her head; she says, “Welcome, ladies and gentleman,” and then the pianist begins and she starts to sing. For a few bars it’s impossible to drag his eyes away from this incredible singer, this stupendously talented woman. But then he looks at Dick and at his face, at the way his frown softens and his eyes widen with joy; he glances sideways at Lew and Lew raises his eyebrows and mouths _I know_ , and Dick blinks in a way that means, _My God_. And this incredible, glorious woman on the stage, Ella Fitzgerald, she sings her song, and beneath the table, between their seats, Lew and Dick’s hands are entwined, and Dick’s fingers tighten around Lew’s—

_Gone._

“You have to understand me,” he says to Dick. They’re outside the office and it’s early spring; he shouldn’t be standing there in his shirtsleeves but he is anyway, he’s shivering and smoking a cigarette and he just stepped right the hell into a puddle so his toes are wet too. They just had a shitty conversation with Stanhope and Lew had to find time and space to calm down and Dick went with him, the way he always does, standing there quietly as Lew rants, like he’s soaking it all up so Lew doesn’t have to deal with it all by himself.

“I do understand,” Dick says, “and I agree that he was being unreasonable—”

“No,” Lew says, “not that, you have to understand me: you _erased_ me, Dick, and now I’m erasing you. Do you get that? Soon we won’t be here any more. Soon you’ll be gone.” Across the street, the world begins to prove his point: a building collapses into itself and vanishes away into nothing. 

Dick looks at it, pale eyes thoughtful. “I erased you? So this is—”

“My memory. Which,” Lew snorts, “I guess means you aren’t even real. So I’m talking to a figment of my imagination.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dick says mildly. “You’ve always been good at figuring out what I want to say. You’re probably getting it right.”

“Sweetheart,” Lew says, and Dick’s mouth twitches into a smile. “Hey,” Lew says, and reaches for him, tangling Dick’s tie around his hand, pulling Dick in closer and closer. “What do we do now?” Their mouths are inches apart. He can feel the heat of Dick through his thin shirt.

“I don’t know.” Dick looks down at his mouth, smiles again, leans in and—

_Gone._

Staggering back to their hotel after a birthday dinner, one of Lew’s old Yale friends; Dick was quiet all evening and part of Lew regretted having brought him into the city because what the hell’s the point if he isn’t even going to make an effort to have any damn fun? It’s embarrassing sitting alongside someone so determined to not enjoy himself, who makes his disapproval so abundantly clear, who looks down his nose at Lew’s friends. And they are not bad people, his friends, they are wealthy and they are sometimes thoughtless with that wealth, they like to live the good life, but that isn’t such a bad thing. It would be Lew’s life if he wasn’t with Dick, and maybe that wouldn’t even be so bad. Right now, they’re happy but why shouldn’t they be happier? Why shouldn’t they get a house with a swimming pool and a library? Why shouldn’t they enjoy their damn lives?

His arm is looped over Dick’s shoulder and although he usually likes walking like this at the end of an evening, exaggerates his drunkenness so that he can lean on Dick as much as he likes, tonight he can’t seem to place his feet on the sidewalk in any kind of regular pattern. His knees keep trying to give way and the only thing holding him upright is Dick’s arm around his waist. “Almost there,” Dick says through gritted teeth.

 _Wealth is not inherently immoral_ , Lew wants to say as he turns to Dick, although he isn’t sure if that’s even true. What happens instead is that he heaves and has to half-fling himself at the gutter to throw up into it. He isn’t fast enough and it gets on his shoes, on his pants, on Dick’s shoes and pants, and Dick says disgustedly, “Jesus Christ,” and holds him up by the shoulders, “For God’s sake, Lewis—”

_Gone._

Their house, December 27th, their own Christmas two days after the real thing. It’s the day they overcooked the beef and undercooked the potatoes and Lew accidentally set fire to his sleeve; he remembers it clearly, _Silent Night_ on the record player making them think of Bastogne, sinking into each other’s arms later on as Judy Garland sang – “Why is this song so sad?” he’d murmured against the side of Dick’s face, and Dick had shrugged and kissed his temple and didn’t let him go. 

In this memory, those things haven’t happened yet. They’re still in the kitchen comparing notes on their family Christmases and he’s halfway through doing a cruel impression of Blanche’s latest squeeze when he realises, he gets it, and he says urgently, “Dick, listen. I don’t want to lose any of this. I don’t want to lose you.”

Dick frowns at him and throws down the tea towel he’s holding – embroidered, poorly, by his sister – and says, “Why did you erase me then?”

“You erased me first!” Lew points out. 

Dick sighs, looking smaller. “I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know how else to get over you. I had to leave, Lew. I couldn’t watch you do that to yourself.”

“You could have talked to me,” Lew says. “You could have—”

“I tried talking to you,” Dick says, “you know I tried.”

 _Not hard enough_ , Lew wants to say, but he doesn’t; instead he admits quietly, “I know.”

Dick smiles and there’s so much sadness in his eyes that it’s impossible to bear. “Look,” he says, “why don’t we—” He’s fading at the edges, his voice is cracking in and out like a scratched record, and when Lew reaches for him he’s—

_Gone._

A shout from beside him, the only thing that’s ever woken Lew up right away. He’s alert, his heart pounding, and next to him in bed Dick’s sitting up, fists clenched in the blankets, sweat pouring from his forehead, staring unseeingly into the darkness, his chest heaving. Lew sits up and leans over to turn on the reading lamp on his nightstand. With gentle hands he reaches for Dick, touches his shoulder and says, “You’re okay, you’re okay. You’re safe, I’ve got you.” Dick starts to come back to himself; the tenseness fades and he mumbles out, “What the heck,” and Lew says, “I think you had a bad dream,” as he pulls Dick in closer. Dick rests his head on Lew’s shoulder, drawing in shaking breaths, and Lew says again, “You’re okay. I’ve got you, sweetheart, I’ve got you—”

_Gone._

Dick’s office, after hours, only the desk lamp on and the door locked tight. Lew’s got Dick crowded up against the wall, snatching kisses from him, tugging at his belt to open it as Dick says, “Not here!” and laughs and Lew says, “Yes here,” and Dick says, “Okay, fine, yes here,” and Lew drops to his knees—

_Gone._

A hotel, overlooking the water, the two of them on the balcony watching the sun fade into the sea. Dick’s drinking a strawberry-daiquiri-hold-the-rum that came with a little paper umbrella at which he blinked in owlish surprise when their drinks arrived via room service. Lew’s got the umbrella tucked in his hair now, mostly because it made Dick laugh and the list of things he won’t do to make Dick laugh is non-existent—

_Gone._

Bed. Curled together, late at night; he can tell Dick’s struggling to keep his eyes open because he’s always up with the birds and Lew isn’t up until there’s coffee and plenty of it. “When I was a kid,” Dick murmurs, “I always felt like I didn’t fit in. When I was in high school, I didn’t have many friends. I didn’t realise at the time that I wasn’t just alone – I was lonely too. I didn’t realise until I met you, Nix.”

“I didn’t realise either. Hell, I was married, and I didn’t even know I was lonely then. I didn’t know I was holding out for you,” Lew says, stroking Dick’s hair back off his temple, touching the line of his cheekbone. “I always felt like I was a bad person and maybe I didn’t deserve to be all that happy, and then I met you and it was like the whole world opened up, I’m telling you.”

“I hate that you were lonely too,” Dick says. “I hate that you felt any bad way at all.”

“You too. You know you’ll never be lonely again, not as long as I’m around, don’t you? I wish I could go back in time and move to goddamn rural Pennsylvania—”

“Lew, for God’s sake, how many times do I have to tell you that it wasn’t that rural?”

“All right, fine, fine, hold the haystacks, but I wish I could go back there and be your friend in high school. I wish I could fall in love with you back then.”

“I wish that too,” Dick says softly. 

Their mouths meet, almost chaste in the darkness. Lew kisses his jaw and his cheek and buries his nose into his hair. “Dick,” he says, quieter now, “do you think I’m a bad person?”

“What?” Dick sounds alarmed.

“I know you’re biased, but objectively, what do you think? You can tell me. I know I can be selfish and shitty and I know I yell too much and I can be an ass—”

“You don’t yell too much,” Dick says. “You’re not an ass. You’re the smartest person I know, and the funniest, and the bravest, and the most interesting, and the kindest too. You’re a good person, Nix. You’re the best person I’ve ever met. You’re my favourite person in the world. I love you like crazy, you know that, right?”

Lew’s throat’s tightening in the darkness, so much love swelling inside his chest that he doesn’t know what to do with it, his eyes wet, and all he can do is whisper “Dick, don’t ever leave me, stay with me forever, okay?” and they’re kissing again, he’s trying to put everything he can’t say in words into that kiss – and he’s desperate to keep this memory at least, just this one if nothing else, just this one—

_Gone._

“I can’t do this,” he says. They’re in the car, on the way to work, and he can feel the dull ache of another hangover beating at his skull. He remembers this day; he complained so much that Dick said something sharp about how his headache was his own damn fault, and then they didn’t speak to each other again until it was time to go home.

Dick sighs at him. “I know you don’t like going to the office—”

“Not that,” Lew says, “although yeah, I hate it, and neither of us should ever do it again.” Dick laughs at that, a little choked noise in his throat. “It’s just that I don’t want to forget you but I don’t know how to stop it – the process is underway now, they’re in my damn head, and they’ve already been through yours. They’re following a trail of memories all the way back. I don’t want them to get everything.”

Dick frowns out at the road. “What about if we go off the trail?”

“Huh?”

“The trail. They’re going for memories that I’m in, right? So take me to memories where I never was so they can’t find me.” Dick looks sideways at him. “We’re going to work, right? So what if I just…”

He twists the wheel and veers into a sideroad. The houses are blurry and Dick stamps down on the brake. They halt next to a house beside an alleyway and tumble out of the car; Lew takes Dick’s wrist and drags him down the alleyway and imagines—

_Gone._

Imagines school. Imagines his dorm room in California. It’s dark, and there are four beds, four small dressers, four trunks, one at the end of each bed. “This reminds me of training,” Dick says from beside him, and goes to sit down on Lew’s bed, bouncing tentatively. “This isn’t so bad.” 

Lew goes to sit beside him. “I was the only person in the school on this night. My parents were a day late to pick me up when the term ended.”

Dick’s mouth turns down. “Doesn’t surprise me,” he says gruffly.

“No, it wasn’t so bad. Come on.” 

He nods at the door and Dick follows him into the corridor. At the end, in the stairwell, the lights are on, and Dick’s eyes widen. “God, you’re young—”

“Sixteen,” Lew says.

Dick makes a _Yikes_ face. 

“Oh, stop. I’ve got my normal brain in here,” Lew says, although he isn’t so sure. He’s more hyperaware of Dick next to him than ever before, like there are pheromones pouring out of him. He wants to climb him like a tree and lick his neck and bite his earlobes and wrap his mouth around his cock and stick his tongue inside his ass—

Dick follows him downstairs cautiously and into the outdoor courtyard. “I once got a handjob against that tree,” Lew tells him, and Dick says firmly, “Well, you’re not getting another one tonight,” and Lew says, “Spoilsport.”

Dick laughs in that way that means, _Subject closed_ , which is bad because handjobs are great, but good because it’s another reminder of the sort of person he is, and it’s nice to know that he isn’t the kind of guy who’d jerk off a sixteen-year-old, even if Lew is presently that sixteen-year-old and would absolutely love to be jerked off. Instead they cross into the old school hall, which is old but looks older. His school was the sort of place that found age impressive, that took its architecture ideas in startlingly accurate detail from colleges at Oxford and Cambridge over in England. Lew’s been to England, went across in a steamer with his parents and Blanche a few years ago, went to shows in London and tried to flirt with English girls who were decidedly not into it because – and this is something he hasn’t admitted even to Dick – he was surprisingly short up until he was thirteen, and they all thought he was younger than he was. The shame! But now he’s sixteen and of perfectly average height, and he has to shave more frequently than any other boy at school, a fact about which he is extremely gratified. Over the winter break he grew almost a full beard that was permitted at home only because his father was oddly proud of having a son with overactive facial hair follicles.

Moonlight is shining in through the high windows, and the floor gleams a rich mahogany. Lew does something he’s always wanted to: he runs a few steps and then skids in his socked feet until he almost falls over, and when he looks back Dick’s laughing and Lew’s laughing too and—

Oh. 

They’re in New Jersey again and Lew says, “Goddamn it, they caught us up.” They’re in the kitchen, and Dick’s midway through making a cake that’s going to come out sunken and raw in the middle; Lew knows he’ll eat around the edges to be polite and so that Dick’s efforts won’t go to waste, and he also knows that he’ll spend half the night going to and from the bathroom because of it, and that Dick will regard him with such a guilty hangdog expression that he’ll find himself laughing even as he wants to shit his brains out. 

He knocks the wooden spoon out of Dick’s hand and batter goes everywhere. “Hey!” Dick says, and Lew says, “Trust me, it’s for the best.”

“Oh.” Dick looks at the splattered kitchen surface before shrugging agreeably. “All right. So take me somewhere different.”

Lew sighs at him. “Take you where exactly? Dick, you’ve been my whole life for eight years, I don’t think there even is anywhere that you aren’t.”

“I appreciate romance as much as the next guy,” Dick says, “but get it together, and do your best—”

_Gone._

They’re in the woods, on one of the walks that they used to take on weekends when Dick started getting a little antsy and “tired of being around so many people all the time,” he’d explained, and Lew said, “You want to take a walk by yourself? It’s okay, I won’t be insulted,” and Dick looked at him like he was crazy and said, “Lew, you’re not people.”

So they’re walking through the woods, dry leaves crackling beneath their boots and their shoulders brushing. Lew remembers how badly he wanted to reach out and hold Dick’s hand on these walks. Why did they stop going on them, he wonders, and then remembers how much he liked to sleep in, how skipping one weekend walk turned into skipping two and then three, how he liked to go into the city sometimes instead and Dick hardly ever felt like going with him. He doesn’t think that was a bad thing, wanting to do a different thing at the weekend than Dick did, but maybe he wishes he’d pushed himself a little more to meet him somewhere in the middle. Maybe he wishes he had more memories like this, the two of them in their own little woodland world, Dick’s face even and happy as he looks up into the trees. 

But Dick’s frowning today and says, “I thought we were going to go somewhere else. Take me somewhere they won’t find me.” 

“Okay, okay,” Lew says, and—

_Gone._

The house, the living room. Dick’s eyes are on a thick book for one of the endlessly dull (and frankly unnecessary) classes he’s taking, but he hasn’t turned a page in ten minutes. His face is frozen, his jaw slightly agape. He always refuses to tell Lew what he’s thinking at times like this. When he hears a car backfire, his face always judders in panic. Lew’s pretty certain that these moments of frozen silence are the same kind of thing. 

Lew gets up from the couch, moves across to him, touches his shoulder. Dick jerks and then makes an effort to pretend that he didn’t. “Want some tea?” Lew asks, and Dick says, “Yeah. Thank you. That would be good.” Lew bends, kisses his forehead, Dick reaches to grab his hand briefly before releasing it again, and—

_Gone._

They’re in bed together again. It’s spring, the light from outside pure and clean, and Lew drags Dick down underneath the sheets. The thrill of waking up with Dick beside him in a real bed hasn’t faded yet, they’ve only been living together a few months and the world has never been more vivid and beautiful. “Somewhere else,” Dick protests, and Lew says, “We’re hidden, aren’t we?” and kisses Dick’s collarbone, presses the flat of his tongue to his nipple, presses a hand down beneath his legs, and Dick’s gasping against him, raking his hands through Lew’s hair and tugging hard, and—

_Gone._

“I told you that wasn’t the best idea,” Dick says. They’re on the beach again, Spring Lake, and they’ve got ice cream cones in their hands even though winter isn’t quite over yet. “And now we’re here?”

“Yeah,” Lew says, and waves a hand at the water. “But it’s worth it, right?”

Dick regards it for a moment, and then he half-smiles and says, “You bet.”

The sun is so bright that the water is almost dazzling, turning the sand to white powder and the sky to the bluest shade of forget-me-not. Lew’s eating chocolate ice cream, his whole body is singing with happiness, and he knows exactly what happened on this day in 1946. He nudges Dick’s shoulder with his own and says, “Remember?”

Dick looks at him and reaches down to knot his spare hand in Lew’s. “I said to you—”

“You asked me if you should finally start thinking about getting your own place,” Lew prompts him.

“I know. And you said that you’d rather I stayed.”

“I was so afraid that you’d say no,” Lew confesses. “I didn’t want it to be a temporary thing with us.”

“It was never just a temporary thing,” Dick says. His eyes are so gentle but he’s holding on tight to Lew’s hand. “For me, you were always how I wanted my story to end.”

Lew can’t help smiling, but it hurts too. “I remember you saying that that day.”

“I meant it.”

“I know.” His chest is tight. “And then you said…”

“I told you that I loved you,” Dick said, “for the first time.”

“Go on,” Lew says.

“I love you,” Dick says softly, and Lew says, “I love you too. I loved you right from the first day.”

The wind is starting to whip the sand up around them. The boardwalk is collapsing into the water, the sky is cracking down the middle. Dick looks down the beach and then back at Lew, and says, “Take me somewhere—”

_Gone._

“—else,” he finishes. They’re still holding hands, but their ice cream is gone and they’re surrounded by people. Lew lets go of his hand quickly and looks around, and damn it, New York? New York. The day he met Dick off the ship. He’d been home for months already, trying to find ways to put off starting at the works – he’d bought his house, paid people to decorate it, moved himself in. He’d picked somewhere with a big back yard so Dick would be happy if he decided to come to stay, if he took that damn job – and also so he could get another dog, if he didn’t manage to get his own dog back, which he didn’t think would happen. Since getting back he’d visited Kathy and Michael exactly one time, and the kid had been so besotted with Sally, the aforementioned dog, that Lew didn’t have the heart to ask for her back. He also hadn’t asked for the kid back, but at the time the dog issue had felt more pressing.

Dick, standing in his dress greens and doing his best to disguise his bewilderment at the mess of people around him, was the best thing Lew had ever seen. Then it quickly became the second best, after his look of relief and happiness when Lew finally found him and clapped a hand on his shoulder. Even now in this memory the sight of Dick standing there, straight-backed and buttoned-up and unfathomably handsome and (best of all) home, makes him smile until Dick flushes and rolls his eyes, curling a hand around Lew’s wrist and starting to pull him through the crowd.

“I don’t think hiding you in a place within the memory’s gonna work,” Lew says. They’re in that restaurant where they had a quiet and awkward lunch, feeling things out with each other, seeing if they had changed (they hadn’t), before booking it home to do obscene things to each other in Lew’s dad’s apartment. “We need to go—”

_Gone._

“—right back into my head.” He takes a breath. They’re in a sunlit hotel room in Zell am See; Dick’s still damp with lake water from his morning swim and his hair is messy and falling over his forehead for once. Lew distinctly recalls a blowjob in the shower on this day, and Dick getting water up his nose before sneezing fourteen times in a row. 

“So you need a memory that you’ve hidden away somewhere,” Dick says, and then winces. “It sounds traumatic.”

Lew shrugs. Life is traumatic, war is traumatic, his family is traumatic; he’s used to most of it by now, and he’s certainly done his fair share of compartmentalising things in his head over the years. Dick was always better at that than him, but Lew is also aware on a level that he doesn’t like to delve into too often that Dick doesn’t have as many things from when he was a kid that he wants to keep hidden. “All right,” he says. “Fine—”

_Gone._

School. He’s fourteen, he finally got that growth spurt and decided to bribe some other guys into being his friends after attempting and failing to use his wit to do so. Right now those friends are surrounding a new kid in the changing rooms, some skinny thirteen-year-old who’s terrified and trying not to show it. The poor kid’s naked, his clothes are in the toilet covered in someone else’s shit, and some other guy – and who the hell is Lew kidding, because he knows that other guy, they were friends for years even after this – anyway, some other guy is approaching him and holding a goddamn lacrosse stick. Lew doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t say anything, and Dick is standing unseen by the doorway with pity and horror in his eyes. It’s almost too late when Lew manages to grit out, “Ah, screw it, leave the kid alone,” and cracks some weak joke that somehow doesn’t come out shaky. His friends disperse somehow, they laugh and they scatter, and Lew knows exactly what happened next: he never looked back at that tiny kid with no clothes, he just left him there in his humiliation. He has never forgiven himself for it, and he knows he never will.

“Lew,” Dick says softly, and Lew chokes out, “He was just a kid,” and Dick says, “So were you,” and Lew says, “That isn’t enough of an excuse, I should have stopped it earlier.” 

Dick looks at him with steady eyes, and it’s a relief that he isn’t trying to sugar-coat it when he says, “You should have, but you did in the end. And there are a lot of things we all should have done that we didn’t.”

“I guess,” Lew says, although he doesn’t feel any better. In the corner the kid is blurring, sobbing (he’ll die in the war, Lew knows that, became a pilot and a hero, Lew felt a stab in the heart when he heard, although that wouldn’t have made a difference to that day anyway) and the room is shifting and Dick says frustratedly, “Damn it, they found us—”

_Gone._

Mama is mad at Dad again, and Lew is under the dining room table and he’s pretty sure they forgot all about him. Mama found something in Dad’s pocket, Lew doesn’t know what, but she found something and she’s sad and mad about it. Dick’s sitting across from him under the table and Lew likes the look of him, he seems steady and reliable even though he has to duck his head pretty far down so it doesn’t get banged. “Lew, is this your house? How old are you?” he whispers.

“It’s my dad’s house,” Lew explains. “And I am five and a half.” In his own pocket he has: a nickel, some fuzz, a ball which is his favourite because it is the bounciest ball maybe in the whole world, the key that broke off his clockwork mouse, and a half-chewed piece of toffee rewrapped in its paper. He thinks that probably whatever was in his dad’s pocket wasn’t any of those things, unless it was the toffee, because candy, his mama once explained, should not be washed with your clothes, and maybe his dad left candy in his pocket and it went all over so now he’s in trouble.

He offers the toffee to Dick, who says, “Wow. Uh, thank you, but no,” so Lew picks most of the paper off it and puts it in his own mouth. His mama’s voice is raising and raising into a screech and his dad’s voice is getting quieter and quieter, and he can feel his whole body tensing up, tensing up – he spits the toffee onto the rug because he thinks he might be sick – and then there’s a slapping noise and a thud and a scream and the air ripples as Dick says frantically, “My God, my God, my God—”

_Gone._

The white box is so small and the baby is gone. Mama hasn’t spoken to him for a long time and the baby is gone. Last night when he was supposed to be asleep, he walked down the long hallway and saw Mama crying in the nursery. The baby is gone, but the baby is in the box, and Lew doesn’t understand which of those things is true. His suit is uncomfortable. He doesn’t like to wear a tie. His papa had to hold his mama as they walked up to the front of the church like she was going to fall over. The man at the front of the church is talking and Lew is sitting next to his nanny, who keeps pulling at him and hissing at him to sit up straight. At the end of the row of seats is Dick, whose head is in his hands. 

The baby is gone. His mama lets out a shriek. His papa tells her to be quiet. The walls start crumbling—

_Gone._

“Lew, I can’t do this to you,” Dick says desperately, “my God, I can’t let you go through these things again.”

They’re in Germany, and the view is, frankly, exquisite. “I wish that when we came here, we knew that Hitler was afraid of heights and hated being here,” Lew says. His hands feel as though they’re shaking and like they’ll never stop. “I think we would have found that funny. I don’t know, Dick, I feel like those things, they aren’t all that abnormal.”

Dick blows out a breath. “I had a sister who died, and my dad sure as hell didn’t tell my mom to shut up during her service.”

“Well,” Lew says, his voice nastier than he’d like it to be, “our dads were very different men.”

“I can’t ask you to do this,” Dick says, “to hide me in your memories, I mean. I don’t want you to see any of those things again.”

“I’d rather have them and you,” Lew says, but Dick looks stubborn in that way that Lew knows means that he’s never going to budge. “Dick, look, what other way is there? They’re taking my damn memories of us away, I don’t want to let you go.”

“Well, I don’t want to spend time in the sorts of memories that you’ve kept hidden, and I don’t want you to have to be there either,” Dick says mulishly. “And it’s my choice, Lew.” He’s squinting, the sun is in his eyes; inside Harry is sprawled out asleep and drunk on Hitler’s most comfortable couch, and Lip and Speirs are having a laughing argument about a silver hand mirror. If it was anyone else, Speirs would already have mailed the thing home, but if Lew knows them at all, that damn mirror spent the rest of its life with Lip’s mom in Huntington. These were good days. They were happy. He’d forgotten the sight of Dick in his uniform, his ramrod-straight posture and his square jaw. He’d forgotten his self-sacrificing ways too, and he isn’t sure if he ever knew the sort of silent pleading that’s in Dick’s eyes right now. “Listen, it isn’t fair. You didn’t have a good past. I’m not going to let you go through that again. I want the best for you, Lew, I want you to have the best future.”

“So what do we do?” Lew’s voice is sticking in his throat. 

“We enjoy the rest of it,” Dick says, and smiles out at the sun, high over the mountains. “And then, one day, we find each other again—”

_Gone._

“I don’t know why I was so mad that she wanted a divorce. It’s not like I wanted to stay with her,” Lew says, on the way into Germany, and Dick turns around in his seat and says, “It’s because she got there first.”

“Huh.” Lew sits with that idea for a moment. It makes a sort of sense. He still remembers this car ride: seething in the back seat while all the men sang and Dick remained irritatingly cheery in the front of the car. He wanted to punch everything in the world, but mostly himself, preferably in the face.

Dick adds, “Also the dog.”

“Mostly the dog,” Lew agrees, and Dick half-laughs. “God,” Lew continues, “you could barely suppress your glee, Winters. There I was in damn emotional agony—” Dick snorts at that. “—Hey! Or, you know, some pain, anyway, and you couldn’t stop smiling. You hated her, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t _hate_ Kathy,” Dick says, and then admits, “I didn’t like the way she was with you. I thought the divorce was a good idea. It was just—”

“The kid, I know,” Lew says, his insides twisting up when he thinks about it. 

“The kid.” Dick sighs. “That’s one of my biggest regrets, you know. Not making you write to them more and visit them.”

“It wasn’t your responsibility to make me do anything like that,” Lew says, although part of him is aware that if Dick had pushed him, he would probably have made more of an effort. It’s always been strange to know that there’s part of him walking around out there in the world, a little boy with his smile (according to Blanche, who encountered Kathy and Michael at the zoo of all places, although Blanche herself never gave any explanation as to why she herself was there other than “I wanted to look at a zebra”). 

“I could have done more,” Dick says, and lets out a breath. His hair’s more wind-ruffled than usual and Lew wants to stretch out a hand to flatten it down. Then after a moment, Dick admits tightly, “I didn’t want to share you.”

Lew hums out a note of approval. “Baby, I love it when you admit you’re flawed,” he says, and Dick makes an aggrieved face—

_Gone._

“Goddamn it,” Lew says. His whole body’s aching for a drink but he can already feel that there isn’t nearly enough in the bottle. He knows where the other bottles are, scattered across the table in the room next door, and he also knows that most of them are empty. This is something that has been in the back of his head for the last few days, because when you enjoy whisky as much as he does, you know exactly how much you have, and where it is, and when you need to get more, but this time he has sorely miscalculated. Today he saw a plane blow up and bodies scatter, he smelled the stink of burning flesh. That means he needs to get obscenely drunk, he needs to block it out, he needs to stop comprehending the world, for a little while at least.

Then Dick is there, Dick with his steady, wary gaze, Dick silently sizing up the situation. _Sorry!_ Lew wants to say, _I’m a liability!_ but he doesn’t, of course; instead he fills his glass and gets demoted, which is an issue mostly because it doesn’t feel like much of an issue and he thinks he should probably be able to care more than he actually does. He’s glad to go back to battalion, anyway. It’s a failure, but that doesn’t matter. He’ll be spending more time with Dick at least, time that he doesn’t have to sneak away to get. _Enjoy it_ , he thinks, _Dick told me to enjoy it, how could I enjoy this_ , and then there’s a wave of clarity and he stares at Dick over his glass. “Did you believe what you were saying?” he asks. “That those kids died as heroes?”

Dick blinks at him. “I believed it when I was saying it,” he says after a moment.

“Did that change?”

“No,” Dick said, and then screws up his mouth. “I don’t know. You realise afterwards, when you think about it more. They were heroes, but the manner of their death didn’t make it so. That was a waste. A tragedy. I understand more now why you were so angry.”

“Yeah.” Lew sips his drink. That seems like a point of view he can live with. His body, this body in the memory, is worn down. He remembers what he said after this: _I want you to fuck me._ He’d wanted to hurt, he remembers that much. He doubts Dick has ever been capable of causing him deliberate physical pain, but there have been times that Lew bit his lip and didn’t let on. That day Dick refused, said something that was transparently an excuse before making a hasty exit, and Lew yelled after him, “So you won’t even do that for me, huh? You won’t even give me that? Asshole!” 

Later that night he woke up – he was sleeping on his side, and there was a bucket on the floor, which he thought probably had something to do with Lip – and Dick was sitting on the other side of the room underneath the golden glow of a small lamp, with a pen and paper in his hands. Lew tried to say _Hi_ , and his mouth did nothing except make a small yelping noise. Dick looked across at him and said mildly, “Hey, Nix. Lip—” Of course it was Lip. “—Lip said you were pretty out of it, so I thought I’d come over for the night.” He got up, crossed to the bed, sat on the edge of it, stroked Lew’s hair back off his face with cool hands, said, “Sleep it off. You’ll feel better in the morning, I promise,” before kissing his forehead—

_Gone._

Haguenau, and Lew’s following Dick up a set of winding stairs to his little office. “You know,” he says to Dick’s incredible ass, which is muscular and round and perfectly formed, “I’ve never been more attracted to you than I am right now,” and Dick laughs, a short hollow sound, and says, “You’re telling me a little rule-breaking floats Lewis Nixon’s boat?” 

Lew reaches out for him as an answer and Dick almost stumbles into his office. They close the door, lock it, shove a chair up against the handle just in case, and Lew says, “You want to see what I do to rule-breakers?”

Dick’s pupils are big in his eyes. “Go ahead,” he says throatily, and perches on the edge of his desk. “Show me,” and so Lew does—

_Gone._

He’d forgotten how cold Bastogne was. Every time the wind blows it feels like a thousand tiny knives even in their foxhole underneath their tarp, and he knows Dick feels the cold more badly than he does. “Come here,” he mutters, “get warm,” and Dick does, shifting right up against him, arm over his waist. “Put your face here,” Lew tells him, unwrapping his scarf so Dick can rest against the warm hollow of his throat, before tucking the scarf back in around the pair of them. It has been a bad day, one of the worst days ever. Toye and Guarnere are off the line and there’s something wrong with Buck Compton. Lew’s never had a lot of time for him, but that doesn’t mean he wants to watch the guy go crazy. But even if he did, he wouldn’t be the only one. Liebgott isn’t doing too well – he’s back from battalion, where his German skills were far outstripped by his hating-the-Germans skills. Malarkey’s stunned and silent after what happened to Muck and Penkala, and Lew knows that there are going to be reverberations through Easy now Toye and Guarnere are gone. And the medic too, Roe – Dick said he thinks he isn’t quite right, but no one is these days, not even the pair of them, so even though Eugene Roe looks as bloodless and frozen cold as the snow, as long as he keeps running around doing his job, he’ll have to stay on the line.

“I can’t believe we got through this,” Dick murmurs, his breath only a little warmer than his skin. 

“I know,” Lew says, holding him tighter. It’s night, he can see the black sky through a rip in the tarp. “I have to go on patrol,” he says, and wraps his half of his scarf around Dick’s neck instead of his own. Even now, even in this memory, he doesn’t feel able to just leave the patrol to chance, even though he knows how it turned out, but it’s important. It’s his duty. It’s one of the few things that are entirely the same about the way that he and Dick view the world, and so he turfs himself out of the foxhole, tries to smile down at Dick’s pale drawn face, and goes to find his men—

_Gone._

He’s asleep when Dick gets back from Paris, asleep sprawled over Dick’s bed, and several glasses of whisky down because he got bored waiting for him to arrive and there was only so long he could attempt to read the French novel he found tucked away on a shelf. The door creaks open and Dick says, “Oh,” and Lew’s too comfortable to move, too bone-meltingly content, so he just flaps a hand and says, “Afternoon.”

“More like evening,” Dick says. He locks the door behind himself. Lew lets his eyes slide shut again as he listens to Dick’s soft movements as he puts down his bag and takes off his shoes. Then there’s his weight on the bed and he lies down next to Lew, curls right up against his back, knees fitting in behind Lew’s, chest pressed against his back, his arm around Lew’s middle. 

“How was Paris?” Lew asks, running his fingertips over Dick’s knuckles.

“Fine,” Dick says, not sounding particularly impressed. “How was England?”

“Okay. I saw Irene.” He feels Dick tense, and adds quickly, “We said goodbye. I mean, I might write, but…”

“Yeah, you and letter-writing don’t mix so well.” Dick’s relaxing again, his mouth on the back of Lew’s neck. 

“I’ll mail her some nylons,” Lew says, and Dick lets out a tired snicker. Lew turns over in his arms and looks at him properly for the first time, the twist of his half-smile, the bat of his eyelashes. “Hey,” he says. “I missed you,” and Dick’s smile broadens, he leans in, their mouths meet—

_Gone._

Dick’s still amped up hours later. “I think what you have to remember,” Lew says from his chair in the corner of Dick’s little office, inspecting the bullet hole in his helmet, “is that I didn’t die.”

“That is _not_ the point here,” Dick says, although in Lew’s opinion it kind of is. He’s still shaky from the adrenaline, but he isn’t as bad as Dick, who doesn’t appear to have sat down for a single second since getting out of the truck and who might accidentally end up vibrating himself out of the window. “The point is that you need to be more careful about your information, Lew. Old men and children, my God—”

“Hey. When I start telling you how to do your job, you can tell me how to do mine,” Lew says. “And anyway, that information was from the Brits.”

Dick rolls his eyes savagely and Lew says, “I always loved seeing you like this.”

“Huh? Like what?” Dick stops still, staring at him. 

“Mad.” He finds himself laughing. “Petty. Acting like kind of an asshole.” Dick makes a questioning face and Lew continues, “You don’t do it with anyone else. Well, with Harry, a little. But mostly you just do it with me.”

Dick looks at him for a moment longer and then down at his desk, shaking his head a little. He’s almost smiling, but not quite. “Well, it’s different with you. You always got it. Lew, I thought you died that day. I thought I was scared before then, but…” He lets out a breath, fingers tapping on his desk. “I had no idea. When I saw you go down…”

He’s silent for a moment and shakes his head. Lew waits for him to say something else but he doesn’t seem to be able to find the words. Finally Dick looks up again and says slowly, “I know it hasn’t been easy since then. But the thought of losing you that day…” He taps his chest, right over his heart. “It hasn’t been good all the time, but not spending those years with you? There’s no point in anything if I couldn’t have had that.”

“You erased me,” Lew says. He feels so happy and so sad at the same time that his voice comes out flat and almost emotionless. “You stopped loving me.”

Dick frowns at him, sharp and sudden. “I didn’t do it because I stopped loving you. I did it because—”

_Gone._

“Why then?” Lew asks, in a field outside Eindhoven. “Why—”

_Gone._

In Aldbourne now, outside the village pub. Lew’s nursing a pint of bitter, and Dick has a lime and soda. “Because,” he says, tracing his fingertip around the rim of his glass, “because I couldn’t stop loving you, and I had to leave you—”

_Gone._

Dick’s small bedroom at the Barnes’ house. The light is dim, and Lew can smell the greenish, dense stink of cabbage cooking from downstairs. He’s sitting on one narrow single bed, and Dick’s over on the other; they had to do that, because otherwise they’d find their hands wandering, and Dick was definitely never willing to do anything more than a little bit of virtuous hand-holding in his English family’s house. “I had to leave you,” Dick says, “because I was making it worse.”

“Making what worse?” Lew says, although he knows the answer.

“You drink,” Dick says, and looks at the ceiling, “which I knew, so I can’t blame you, I knew what I was getting into.”

“You can blame me a little,” Lew offers. 

Dick doesn’t quite laugh. “Thanks. But it was happening more and more, and it wasn’t just the drinking – you weren’t happy, and I was contributing to that. There were days you couldn’t get out of bed and it wasn’t just hangovers, although I knew they didn’t help, and I was – I couldn’t leave you, because I loved you and I knew I’d just keep going back to you, but I couldn’t stay, because I wasn’t helping either.”

Lew says: “Oh,” and then, more tentatively, “I’m not unhappy because of you.” He is unhappy, though. That much is true.

“I know.” Dick rakes a hand through his hair. “But it wasn’t good for either of us and—”

_Gone._

A hotel room, Dick with his ankle bandaged and his foot elevated on a heap of pillows. “God, you were so _mad_ about getting shot,” Lew says. “I’ve never seen anyone more irritated at a bullet.”

“A ricochet,” Dick says, lifting his leg exasperatedly. “It was my fault. I wasn’t focusing.”

“I remember visiting you while you were on bedrest,” Lew says. He finds himself shifting over to Dick’s side, lowering himself down on top of him, so careful of that bandaged leg. “I remember doing this…” He leans down, presses a kiss to Dick’s mouth. “And then I…” He kisses the side of his neck, the hollow of his throat. Dick’s pupils are already blown wide and a smile’s starting to edge itself onto his face. “I mean,” Lew says, settling back, fingers in the waistband of Dick’s shorts, “how else was I supposed to make you feel better? A guy had to do _something_ , you’d been shot after all.”

“It was very considerate of you,” Dick says, that familiar flush starting to spread from his neck to his cheeks.

“That’s me all over—”

_Gone._

The airfield. Dick smeared in black, his face pale and intent, speaking seriously to his men. Lew remembers craving some sort of final goodbye, but he figured that if this was his last sight of Dick Winters, it was a good one – and then he looks up, their eyes meet, and Dick’s composure wavers. _Bye_ , Lew mouths to him, and Dick raises a hand in farewell, looking lost for just a second—

_Gone._

Shames is out for the evening, which means that Lew and Dick are in. His cottage isn’t much but at least it’s considerably more private than where Dick’s been staying. Dick often spends the evening with his English family, but then he goes out for runs late at night – and that’s where he’s supposed to be right now, supposed to be pounding the twisty, winding streets of Aldbourne. Instead he’s in Lew’s bedroom, one knee hooked over Lew’s shoulder, Lew’s fingers inside him, his head thrown to the side and the edges of his bright hair dark with sweat—

_Gone._

Lew’s half-drunk but not so drunk that he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing when he drags Dick behind a barn so he can have his wicked way with him. “Um,” Dick says, and Lew shuts him up with his mouth. They’re on their way back from the Blue Boar; when Dick rose to leave, Lew said “I’ll walk you!” before saying over his shoulder to the others, “He gets lost easily.” (“Shut up,” Dick muttered as they left, and Lew laughed and clapped him on the back.)

It only takes a split second for Dick to start kissing him back, fast and determined, and not for the first time Lew feels the thrill of having Dick Winters like this, flustered and desperate and rocking hard against him. “Damn it, Nix,” Dick says, pushing him back against the wall, and Lew feels himself groan against Dick’s mouth at that brief flash of sweet pain and then again when he feels Dick’s hand against him—

_Gone._

England, in Lew’s house. “Do you remember when we said we wouldn’t do this again?” Lew asks. His hands are curled around Dick’s hips, and their mouths are less than an inch apart. 

“We were young and dumb,” Dick says, and kisses him quickly. “And you had a baby, I couldn’t just—”

“But you did,” Lew says, and Dick sighs almost sadly before repeating: “But I did—”

_Gone._

Lew likes the water, but in a surprise to absolutely nobody he does not like troopships. The whole place reeks of seawater and vomit and old food and sweat and piss, and although Dick takes a lot of walks below deck to talk to the men and to check on them, Lew can’t bring himself to go nearly as often. He figures he doesn’t need to, anyway – he doesn’t command any of them directly, and they’re all attached to Dick in a way that makes him feel strangely jealous (of the men or of Dick?) and proud at the same time.

Dick comes up to their cabin from below pale-faced, because he’s excellent at plenty of things but seafaring isn’t one of them. “Come on,” Lew says, standing over his bunk, where he’s lying looking stony and nauseated, and poking his shoulder, “let’s get some air.”

It’s cold outside in a bracing way, and there’s already more colour in Dick’s cheeks as they lean on the rail and inhale the salty air. “You were right,” Dick says, and Lew says, “Aren’t I always?”

Dick shoots him a look that means _Very funny_ , and Lew laughs. The sky is black and empty except for the stars, high and golden, and there’s something comforting that he takes from it, from the endlessness of the dark water and the darker heavens. He has always been reassured by knowing that his existence is mostly insignificant. He lets the back of his hand press against Dick’s, and although Dick doesn’t turn to look at him, he links his little finger in with Lew’s and squeezes it gently—

_Gone._

It isn’t ideal to meet his son for the first time while stupendously hungover, but it was also pretty inevitable, judging by all the drinks people kept buying to congratulate him the previous night. He’d been looking forward to the birth of his child, of course he was, although he’d felt something strange and sad inside him when the telephone call had come and he’d heard it was a boy. Following in Stanhope’s and Lew’s own footsteps didn’t seem like much of a future for any baby. 

He gets back to the base on Sunday, a couple hours earlier than he needed to – _I have to go_ , he told Kathy, _you know what they’re like_ , and she nodded and didn’t look up at him from their baby’s face. Michael is a good name, a solid name, no history there, which bodes well. The baby itself – well, Lew had been expecting to feel more, that’s all. The baby lay there on Kathy’s chest, a pink wiggly little worm, and Lew had expected to feel a connection but he hadn’t, even when he’d held it and it had cried in his arms, and that’s something he knows he can never tell anybody. 

He’s just making his way out of the barracks as Dick’s coming in, and they almost smash into each other. Dick takes a step back, apologises, and then says, “How’s the baby?”

“Wonderful,” Lew says immediately, and there must be something in his voice or face that’s off, because Dick’s eyes narrow fractionally. “He’s a very good, healthy little guy,” Lew says, trying to sound firmer now.

“Well, that’s great news. I’m so pleased for you, Lew,” Dick says, and smiles as he reaches out to grasp Lew’s shoulder.

Even now, even in the memory, Lew looks at his face and he doesn’t think he’s faking it, despite everything that happened before. “You really meant it, didn’t you?” he asks.

“Of course,” Dick says, his grip on Lew’s shoulder loosening. “I wanted you to be happy. You know that.”

“It should have been you, not me. You would have been such a good dad,” Lew mutters—

_Gone._

Dinner, at Kathy’s house in Georgia. He brought Dick along with him, because when he asked if he had weekend plans, Dick hesitated for a moment too long before claiming he was busy, and Lew managed to ferret out of him that all he had planned was yet another reread of his little training manuals. Kathy’s friends are there, couples from Georgia she somehow got to know and for whom Lew feels no particular affection. Every time he sees her she looks different, her belly swelling and swathed in a variety of voluminous fabrics, her face somehow changed from the last time they met. He’s starting to think that he never had a concrete picture in his head of her at all. 

They’re dining on veal, which he never cared for and which Dick shovels down mechanically. Kathy’s friends ask him questions about himself, about the army, and Dick answers politely, but Lew can sense he isn’t comfortable from the set of his jaw. He doesn’t feel comfortable himself and he can’t remember how he and Kathy used to rub along together. Did she ever like him all that much? She doesn’t particularly seem to, tells him in front of everyone when she thinks he’s had enough to drink (Dick raises his eyebrows at his plate at that one) and lets out a disgusted, embarrassed sigh when one of his jokes lands badly (Dick laughs, God bless him). 

Maybe if he hadn’t been drafted. Maybe if things had been different. But he doesn’t feel like he knows who this woman is, and he hasn’t for months. He’s grateful when dinner’s over: the ladies retire together to talk about baby-related things that apparently he isn’t allowed to hear about even though the baby is his, and the gentlemen gather to smoke in the sitting-room. Lew spends too long talking to the cook, whose company he frankly enjoys more than anyone else’s except Dick’s, and then decides to put off socialising for another moment by ducking outside into the muggy Georgia spring to smoke a cigarette. He’s quiet, which means that for once he notices Dick without being seen himself. Dick’s sitting on the little bench that looks out over the lawn, and his head is in his hands like he’s got a terrible headache.

“Hey,” Lew says, moving closer to him, and Dick looks up quickly. Lew’s expecting him to plaster a smile onto his face or at least an expression of studied blankness, but instead he looks despairing. “How can we do this, Lew? How do you expect me to do this?” he says in a low voice, and Lew feels something shatter inside his chest as he sits down beside Dick and says, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Dick draws in a breath. “Those evenings at your house. They were hell, Lew.”

“I’m sorry,” Lew says. It seems like the only thing he can say.

Dick shakes his head. “I watched you with her, and even though you weren’t that happy together, at least she could give you that life. I hated that I couldn’t give you anything like that.”

“What you gave me was enough,” Lew says. “It was everything I wanted.”

That night they sat in the back yard together in sad silence until one of Kathy’s friends stuck her head out of the back door and said, “What _are_ you boys doing out here?” and then they were dragged inside to play unending games of whist and rummy. In this memory Lew reaches for Dick, presses his mouth against his, feels Dick’s hand slide into his hair—

_Gone._

One of their rare weekends together off the base. Lew told Kathy his pass was cancelled, told the rest of the boys that he and Dick were going to his wife’s house for some good old-fashioned home cooking. They ate dinner at a small restaurant, overcooked beef and hard potatoes that was nonetheless better than the chow that was slopped onto their plates at Toccoa. Dick’s been in a good mood all day, talkative, telling him about Luz’s impersonation of Sobel (“I told him not to do it, but Lew, you should have heard it, I had to laugh”) and the rows and rows of tiny, perfect stitches that Eugene Roe’s been practising all over everything in reach (“I don’t imagine he’ll get much time to do it in the field, but I think that kid’s something special”). 

“You’ve been quiet,” Dick says, when they’re almost at their hotel room door. They’ve been to this place before: it’s discreet and out of the way, and that’s all they’re looking for. “What are you thinking about?”

Lew opens the hotel room door, slams it shut a little too hard behind them. Dick’s gaze turns from bright to wary. “Kathy’s pregnant,” Lew says, and Dick lets out a sigh like a bird falling from the sky—

_Gone._

The first time hurts. He’s done stuff with other guys before, he’s sucked a couple of dicks in his time and jerked off a few guys, he even fucked a couple of them at college, but he hasn’t ever done this. He’s lying face down on a hotel bed and Dick’s fingers are inside him. He’s taking deep steadying breaths, because he wants to do this and he wants to know what it’s like, and there isn’t anyone else in the world he’d like to do this with more than Dick. But it’s hard to force himself to relax; it feels vulnerable and intimate in a way that’s almost embarrassing. He’s worried that his body might do something awkward. Once when he and Kathy were in bed together she suddenly came on, and although he didn’t particularly care, she cried and made him sleep in the spare bedroom. He doesn’t want to have to rent another hotel room tonight so he and Dick can stew in separate humiliation.

It feels good, though, the way that Dick’s moving his fingers inside him. He has long, clever fingers, and beautiful hands, and when he brushes against a certain point inside Lew it almost takes him right over the edge. “Jesus Christ,” he says, scrabbling to push his ass in the air more and to wrap his hand around his dick, and Dick half-laughs, leans over him to kiss the back of his neck. There’s something in that simple action that makes Lew feel a wave of affection and he says, “Here, you think I can face the other way?” and Dick says, “Sure, I guess, huh, let’s see,” and together they move and figure it out so that Lew’s on his back.

It feels even more vulnerable, but so is the way that Dick’s looking down at him. He’s pink-faced, big-eyed and his cock’s so hard that Lew’s surprised he hasn’t lost his mind and got himself off. It’s astonishing. He doesn’t know how he ever got to be lucky enough to have this effect on Dick Winters. “God, Lew,” Dick breathes, and braces himself over Lew to kiss him as he presses his fingers inside him again. 

It’s easier this way. He feels more settled and secure. He rests his hand on the back of Dick’s neck and lets his body fall into what’s happening. Tentatively, Dick slips another finger inside him, and he likes the feeling of the stretch, lets out a breathy sigh. “Listen, this is good, we can try it,” he murmurs against Dick’s mouth, and Dick says, “Yeah? You sure, Nix?” 

It’s the sound of his voice that makes Lew entirely sure, more certain than he’s ever been of anything before, that reliable, familiar voice full of care and consideration. He thinks with a shock, _I might love you_ , and says, “Yeah, I’m sure,” and Dick kisses him again—

_Gone._

They can run up Currahee at night whenever they like, which means they can also veer off into the woods to make out like sloppy teenagers at night whenever they like. It’s stupid, it’s dangerous, and it’s entirely worth it: there’s something intoxicating about the shape of Dick’s mouth, the taste of his skin, his hardness inside his shorts. It’s been too long since they last saw each other, Lew’s been across the country and back, and if he’s entirely honest with himself (which he rarely is) he thought of Dick for most of the journey.

Lew kisses him messy and full of tongue, grinds down into him, feels Dick’s fingers biting hard into his ass. God, he wants him, wants every inch of his body, wants to swallow up the little breathy noises that Dick’s trying to stifle, wants to kiss him and kiss him and kiss him, wants to wrap his mouth around his cock, wants to come into his mouth and watch pearly white spilling over the corner of Dick’s lips, wants to hold him down and fuck him, and the best part is that Dick (somehow!) seems to feel the same way. “Jesus, Nix,” Dick says, nipping Lew’s lip and pressing kisses onto his jaw, his neck, the side of his face as Lew kisses his neck, “Jesus Christ—”

_Gone._

Lew’s been drinking when it happens, just the right amount: he’s drunk enough that he can claim it was a dumb mistake, and sober enough that Dick will know it wasn’t really. Officer candidate school is over, which means that Dick’s off to South Carolina and Lew’s going to California. He managed to get Dick to stay out late to celebrate with the other newly minted officers, drinking soda with a quiet smile, always responding to jokes but never quite cracking any of his own. 

They cut out just a little earlier than the others, and there’s relief in Dick’s eyes when Lew gets up from his bar stool. Together they walk in the dark towards the barracks. Even night in Georgia is hot and humid, and Lew’s pretty sure that neither of them have stopped sweating at any point over the last three months. It’s less sticky than usual, though – the stars are out and the sky is clear. If Dick was a girl, Lew would reach for his hand. Some days, he feels like doing that anyway.

They’re the first ones back, so Lew follows Dick into his room, the way he often does at the end of a day, to annoy him or to talk to him; most frequently, to do both. Dick sits down with a sigh on the end of his bed and starts unlacing his boots, but he stops when Lew sits down beside him, so close that their shoulders and thighs are touching. He raises an eyebrow to start with, like Lew’s about to play a practical joke on him and he’s preparing himself for it, but there’s something defenceless and open in his eyes. “Hey,” Lew says, and slides a hand onto the side of Dick’s neck, stroking the corner of his jaw with his thumb. 

Dick doesn’t move away. Instead he says, “Hey,” right back and there’s a flash of some sort of emotion over his face, an intense and wild happiness that tears Lew open right down to his heart. They’re too tentative to start with: they almost bump noses and then hum out laughs, and then Lew gets a grip on him and kisses him hard with passion and desire, the way someone as good and as true as Dick deserves to be kissed. Dick’s mouth opens; he tastes like sugar and mint, and he kisses with just as much attention to detail as he does everything else. Lew kisses him over and over, kisses his mouth and then his neck, starts pulling at the buttons on Dick’s shirt, and Dick says, “Wait – wait, wait.”

“Oh?” Lew freezes, wondering if he’s about to be shoved away.

“The other guys. They’ll be back soon,” Dick explains. He’s a little out of breath and there’s stubble burn around his mouth, and unfortunately that mouth is making an excellent point.

“Goddamn it,” Lew mutters, and lightly touches the red skin next to Dick’s lips. “Fine.” 

Dick shifts and Lew thinks he’s about to move away but instead he kisses the end of Lew’s finger. Then he says, his voice throaty, “Back to your own room, soldier.”

“Damn,” Lew says, adjusting his pants as he stands up. Dick’s watching him with a smile in his eyes, and the sort of matching smile on his mouth that’s so subtle Lew’s pretty sure he’s the only person who can tell when it’s there. “Well, then. All right.”

“All right,” Dick echoes, and stands up. He makes an uncomfortable face as he adjusts his own pants and Lew catches his eye so they can laugh at each other from across the room. 

Lew’s so happy he feels like he could take off into the air, and he remembers then with a thud: _I’m going to lose this memory. I’m never going to know about this again_. “Dick,” he says, and Dick looks over. “I thought this might be the last time I ever saw you, I thought after OCS it might all be over,” Lew tells him. “I had to try it. I mean, you could have popped me one, but I didn’t think you would, even if you weren’t into it.”

“But I was,” Dick says with a smile, and Lew echoes, “But you were.” He takes a breath. The room shatters—

_Gone._

Lew’s seen him around, this tall redheaded man who’s one of the only people there who pays attention during all the lectures and who barely socialises in the evenings. There’s something about him, a kind of self-assured peace that Lew finds both entirely foreign and bizarrely appealing. He asks around as subtly as possible, and finds out that the guy’s name is Dick Winters. He watches Dick Winters go about his life, and discovers that he’s a fanatic about physical activity, that he unconsciously switches his pen to his left hand when he’s trying to make notes extra quickly, that he always has a library book on his nightstand (he likes mysteries and history), and that he’s the only other person in the entire camp who was paying enough attention to laugh when one of their instructors almost fell asleep during a talk from a visiting colonel and accidentally stuck his pen up his nose. Lew also notices that Dick Winters has a surprisingly lovely laugh, and he determines that he’d like to hear that laugh more often.

Dick Winters changes his library books every Saturday morning, and so Lew makes it his business to be there standing outside the library when he comes out. It’s already warm, the sun high in the sky, and when Dick comes outside his hair shines like a buoy in the ocean. He looks quiet and contained and pensive, and Lew thinks, _I can’t believe that’s my entire future there, wrapped up in one man_. He says, “Dick Winters?”

Dick smiles at him quizzically. “Hi. What can I do for you?”

Lew shrugs a shoulder. “I’m bored. Want to take a walk?”

Somehow, Dick manages to frown and smile at the same time. Then he says, “I don’t see why not.”

The air shimmers around them. Lew’s afraid of taking a breath; he’s afraid of letting this go. He says, “Dick, this is it. This is the last memory. Once this is gone, so are you.”

Dick stares at him and then, carefully, he turns and puts his library books on the library steps. “Okay then. Come on.”

“Where are we going?” Lew takes Dick’s outstretched hand.

“Just around the corner,” Dick says, but what corner he means, Lew doesn’t know; he can smell salt on the air though, and the dried mud and grass is turning to sand beneath their feet. 

“Maybe I can hide you somewhere else,” Lew says, but he doesn’t feel much hope about it, and Dick sighs and says, “I wish you could. I wish it had worked.”

“I wish _we_ had worked,” Lew says. “More than anything else, I wish we had.”

They’re on the beach now, they’re at Spring Lake in the summer, and Dick’s blue eyes are narrowed against the sun. Lew undoes his top two shirt buttons, reaches down to unlace his boots and roll up his pants; beside him, Dick’s doing the same thing, and together, hands linked, they walk down to the water. It’s cool and delicious on their bare feet and the sun is so warm that Lew feels like he’ll never be too cold again. They stand together and look out at the horizon, where the water meets the sky. “What now?” Lew asks.

Dick shrugs a shoulder and pulls Lew in against his side. “We enjoy the time we have.” He’s so close; Lew turns to him, wraps his arms around his neck, feels Dick’s hands on his waist. From somewhere far off he thinks he can hear the golden strains of Ella’s voice. “I love you,” Dick murmurs, and Lew says, just as soft, “I love you too.” For the last time, their mouths find each other’s, and Lew tries to pour everything into it, all the love, all the grief, all those years they spent together. “Meet me here,” Dick says, so close to Lew’s face even as he fades away. “Meet me in Spring Lake.” Above them, the sun shifts behind a cloud. And then—

**_tomorrow_ **

Despite the rickety appearance of Dick’s bed, it had been one of the better nights of sleep of Lew’s life. They’d eaten bacon sandwiches before bed and then Lew had looked at Dick’s bookshelf, which contained a number of titles that he too had read and enjoyed, and then they had gone back to bed and had the sort of slow, lazy sex that he associated for some reason with a Sunday afternoon. Dick slept almost silently beside him, curled into his pillow like a mouse, but on the one occasion that Lew had awoken in the middle of the night he found that Dick had outstretched a hand in his sleep to curl around Lew’s arm, and when he shifted around to find a more comfortable position Dick frowned and reached out for him again. 

In the morning he awoke alone, felt a jab of worry, and then heard Dick’s voice, humming from down the corridor. He smiled at the ceiling before getting out of bed and pulling on his pants and shirt from the previous day. They smelled like rain and salt and, when he pressed his nose against his collar, he found the scent of Dick. Two things were very clear: firstly, that he wasn’t hungover for the first time in a while, and secondly that he was in desperate need of a drink. When he outstretched his hand his fingers seemed to be shaking, and his stomach was turning over in a way that felt different from most mornings. How much did he have left in his flask? Would Dick have any more beers? He hated the idea of drinking in front of him in the morning, but his flask was inside his coat pocket, which was in the living room where Dick was. Damn it. 

He steeled himself, went into the bathroom first, rinsed out his mouth with mouthwash. Annoyingly, Dick seemed to buy the alcohol-free version. Then he thought with utter clarity that the fact he’d momentarily considered drinking mouthwash to stop his hands from shaking was probably a very bad thing. 

In the living room, Dick was drinking coffee and reading, squinting at the pages like he needed glasses. The smile he threw Lew as he came in was warming and incredible. “There’s more in the pot,” he said, lifting his cup, and Lew murmured his thanks, poured himself some, told himself to just get it over with. He crossed to his overcoat, pulled out his flask, and splashed less whisky than he wanted to into his coffee.

Dick’s eyes were on him as he turned around. “In the morning, huh?” Magically, he didn’t sound judgemental.

“I know, I know.” Lew sat down next to him, rubbing a hand over his face tiredly. 

“You ever think about cutting back?” There was a little more tension behind those words and Lew felt as though perhaps it was some sort of test.

“I’d like to,” he said, realising that it was the truth. “But it’s hard. I find it very difficult. I…” He extended a shaking hand, to demonstrate. 

Dick looked at his hand, the corner of his mouth downturned. Then he reached out and linked his fingers with Lew’s. “Drink your coffee,” he said, not unpleasantly. Their joined hands lay between them on the couch as Lew used his other one to drink his coffee and whisky. 

He felt better afterwards, although he didn’t know how much of it was psychological. “I thought about drinking your mouthwash,” he admitted to Dick.

Dick blinked at him, and then he said, “Oh, boy. You’re going to be a handful. You’re lucky you’re a good lay.”

Lew found himself laughing and shifting sideways, resting his head on Dick’s shoulder. Dick pressed a kiss to his forehead, and showed him a paragraph in his book that he thought Lew would like – he was right – and then he said, “All right. Up and at ’em,” and stood up. “I’m going to take a shower.”

“All right,” Lew said. He picked up Dick’s book and started to read the back of it.

“I said, I’m _going_ to take a damn shower,” Dick said again, more meaningfully this time. “By which I mean: care to join me, Nix?”

It had been a long time since anyone except Harry had called him that. He got to his feet, less gracefully and more eagerly than he would have liked. “Hell, yes,” he said, and Dick grinned at him.

*

After their shower, Lew borrowed a shirt of Dick’s, which smelled cleaner and fresher than any shirt that Lew had ever owned. They went to the grocery store, where Dick selected wholewheat bread with far too many seeds in it and whole milk and red apples. “What do you want for dinner?” he asked.

Lew said, “How about I take you out somewhere?” and Dick flushed a little and said, “All right, if you want.”

“I want,” Lew said, and tugged Dick’s belt loop to pull him closer after making sure that nobody was looking at them. Dick bought ham and bananas and orange juice, and Lew helped him carry the bags to his car. 

“We could go into the city to go somewhere really special,” Lew said, when Dick had started the car. “We could go to a club. There are places, you know, where guys like us can go dancing.”

“You ever been to one?” Dick glanced sideways at him.

“No,” Lew admitted, “but I know they exist.”

“Maybe another time,” Dick said, frowning at the road. “I don’t know about clubs. There are a lot of people at them.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of the point,” Lew said, laughing, and Dick rolled his eyes. Lew reached over to poke him in the cheek so he’d start laughing too; it worked, and Dick was still smiling when he pulled up outside his building. “Maybe somewhere that isn’t so fancy tonight,” Lew suggested instead as he picked up one of the bags of groceries from the trunk, and Dick nodded and said, “Yeah. I’d like that.”

Upstairs Dick put away the groceries while Lew lit a cigarette and made more coffee. They’d bought donuts for a late breakfast – “A weekend treat,” Dick said, like he was really going crazy with all that sugar, and Lew said, “Slow down there, buddy, isn’t that a little too wild?” – and sat together at Dick’s little table to eat them. Lew grinned across as Dick sucked powdered sugar from his fingertips and Dick smirked right back at him. He knew exactly what he was doing. What a brilliant asshole.

Over the donuts, they talked. Dick’s dad had died about a year after he’d come home from Europe, and there was more pain in his eyes when he mentioned it than Lew thought he’d ever felt about his mom. It seemed less complicated for Dick, though, which was something. They both had little sisters they loved, and it seemed that Lew wasn’t the only one who had been single for a long time. Dick frowned and said, “I guess I never met anyone I really wanted to be with. I haven’t been looking for anyone.”

“I guess neither have I,” Lew said, and admitted, “although I think that one day I’d like to find someone.”

Dick’s eyes were on his as he said, “Me too. I think I’d like that. What about your kid? It kind of sounded like you aren’t close to… him? Her?”

“Him,” Lew said. “His name’s Michael. Yeah, I don’t see him as much as I should, but his mom remarried. They’re happy, they’re a good little family. I don’t want to mess things up for them.”

“Very selfless,” Dick said, leaving something unspoken.

“Also selfish, I know,” Lew acknowledged. “You know what? Maybe one day. Maybe someday soon I’ll call them and ask if I can take him out somewhere. We could go to the zoo. I’ll show him a zebra – everyone likes zebras. I could be a fun dad, right?”

“You could definitely be a fun dad,” Dick agreed cheerfully.

“See? This is why I like you. I’ve only known you for a day and you’re already more supportive than anyone else in my life.” It was a joke, but once the words were out he realised it was also true. That was depressing. He let out a laugh, but Dick didn’t look fooled, so he said quickly, “Hey, do you want to go for a walk?”

Dick looked happily surprised. “Yeah! That sounds like a great idea.” He was the sort of person who cleared up after himself so they stacked their plates and cups in his sink – Dick cast a longing look at them, clearly wanting to wash up, but Lew viewed that as a step too far – and made their way outside again. 

“Let’s take my car,” Lew said, finding his keys in his pocket.

Dick had retrieved his mail from his mailbox and was in the middle of tearing an envelope open. “Sure,” he said, and then said, “Hey, can I drive?”

“By all means.” Lew threw him the keys. “Are you asking because of what I put in my coffee? Because I’m telling you that at this point, an amount like that probably makes me drive better.”

Dick rolled his eyes and thrust his handful of post into Lew’s hands. “Whatever you say, Nix. Hold these for me.” Inside the car he turned the radio on, and jiggled with the knobs and buttons until he’d found some Glenn Miller. “I fought alongside a guy who loved this piece,” he said. “A guy from Oregon. Don Malarkey.”

“Don Malarkey?” Lew looked at Dick. “Really? I knew a Don Malarkey.”

“You did?” Dick shot an interested glance at him and then said “Jesus Christ,” as a kid on a bike shot by the car as he was about to pull out. “Did you see how close he was?”

“Way too close,” Lew agreed, sifting through the pile of Dick’s mail in his hands. An advertisement for a local guy who did landscaping, a letter with the address written in swirling feminine writing – “Hey,” Lew said, looking at the return address, “you got a letter from your sister!” and Dick made a pleased noise as he nodded along to the song on the radio.

The other envelope was the one that Dick had absently torn half open. It was a fat envelope, the sort of long letter that Lew had never really received, and the writing was a kind of messy chicken scratch. Obviously Lew wasn’t planning on reading Dick’s mail, but the envelope was already half open and he thought that maybe he could make some kind of joke, tease him about having multiple women writing to him. He cast an eye over the folded letter quickly, turning it over in his hands. A nickname, maybe, that he could make fun of—

But there, on the top of the paper, was his own name. He cast a glance sideways at Dick, who looked cool and unruffled, tapping on the steering wheel in time with the song. He looked more closely at the paper. _I, Dick Winters, want to erase Lewis Nixon._

Erase him? What the hell did that mean? How could someone erase another human being? And what did this even mean? They’d only just met. Was Dick playing some kind of messed up prank on him? There was absolutely nothing funny about this, and Dick didn’t seem like that sort of person. But he didn’t know Dick at all, they’d met perhaps twenty-four hours ago, so it was impossible to say exactly what sort of person he really was. It was Dick’s personal mail, and Lew knew for a fact that he shouldn’t read it, but his own name was there. There was no way that he could ignore this.

_I, Dick Winters, want to erase Lewis Nixon. He’s selfish, and lazy, and I don’t have any respect left for him. He drinks much more than he should, and although he says he’ll quit, I don’t see any evidence that he actually wants to or cares enough to try._

He was cold. His stomach rolled. Dick was still watching the road, still listening to the song. Lew read on.

_When he drinks, he’s a different person. He’s sloppy, and it’s pathetic._

“I’m not pathetic,” he muttered. Was he pathetic? Did Dick think he was pathetic?

“Huh?” Dick said.

“Nothing,” Lew said flatly. 

_I don’t see how anyone could ever respect someone who behaves the way that Lew does. He doesn’t care about anything other than his own comfort. Even then, he can’t take care of himself. He doesn’t keep himself clean or feed himself. He almost set fire to our house, multiple times. He gets into black moods and refuses to let anybody help him. He has a child he doesn’t bother to see, and a sister whose bad behaviour he only encourages. He lashes out, out of spite, and says cruel things when he’s drunk. He likes to hurt people. He likes to hurt me._

“I would never hurt you,” Lew said, louder this time. The paper is crumpling in his fist. “I didn’t hurt you, Dick. Pull my car over right now.”

“What?” Dick looked alarmed.

“Pull my fucking car over!” 

They screeched to a halt by the side of the road. “What kind of prank is this?” Lew pushed the letter at Dick. “You wrote this shit about me? When’d you get the chance to do it, huh, when I was asleep? What kind of sick, twisted bullshit is this? Get the hell out of my car!”

Dick’s eyes were wide, the letter in his hands; he looked down at it unseeingly but whatever bullshit was on his face didn’t seem to matter. Lew reached over, shoved at his shoulder. “Did you hear me? Get the hell out, or I’ll get you out myself.”

He was shaking. He slammed out of the passenger door and stormed around to the driver’s side. Dick was already getting out of the car, fumbling through the papers in his hands. There was more than just the words Lew had read: there were pages and pages all in that shitty chicken scratch writing. “Is that your writing?” Lew demanded. “Tell me, for the love of Christ.”

Dick shook his head rapidly. “Yeah, but I didn’t write this. I don’t remember writing this.” 

“So what the hell? You entered a fugue state to write a hundred-page letter talking shit about me? You psychotic creep. Get out of my way.” Lew shouldered Dick aside and got into the driver’s side of his car. The keys were still dangling from the ignition. Lew slammed the door shut behind himself, grabbed a cigarette, lit it, cranked the window down an inch. “Fuck you. I liked you,” he snapped, and Dick said, “Lew, wait—” and Lew drove away.

It was only a five-minute car journey to his house, and he couldn’t decide if it felt longer or shorter. Nothing seemed to make any sense. His stomach churned and he had never wanted a drink so badly before in his life. Dick’s thoughtful face in his apartment. _You ever think about cutting back? You’re lucky you’re a good lay._ Damn it. And the letter: _He’s sloppy, and it’s pathetic._ Was he pathetic? Some days he felt pathetic, but he’d thought that was all in his head and nobody else could tell. And anyway, he hadn’t been remotely close to pathetic the day before. They’d had a walk on the beach and the fuck of a lifetime. He hadn’t been some sad, twisted old lush; he hadn’t said anything shitty. He certainly hadn’t been cruel, at least that he was aware of. It made no goddamn sense at all.

He twisted into his driveway, got out of his car, fished in his pocket to find his housekeys. As he fumbled, he caught sight of a dark-haired guy approaching his house. There was something familiar about his silhouette, about his mess of curly hair, his straight nose, his pale eyes—

“Captain Nixon?” The guy’s voice was tentative.

“Yeah?” Strange to answer to that name again after all this time, but everything else was strange, so why the hell not this as well? 

“I have this for you, sir.” In his hands was another thick envelope, which he held out tentatively. 

Lew felt like the world was swaying around him. He reached out and snatched the envelope, and then the guy’s name came to him. “Webster? You’re Webster, aren’t you? Easy Company?”

“Yes, sir. David Kenyon Webster. Private,” he said, grimacing like the title didn’t sit right with him. 

“What the hell is this? What’s happening? Talk to me, Private.” Lew still had it; Webster looked shaken, like he wasn’t sure what to say next or what Lew might do. He felt like the envelope was about to burn holes through his fingertips. He tore it open and said, “Spit it out,” as he scanned the papers. This was his own handwriting. Of course he recognised his own writing. 

_My name is Lewis Nixon and I want to erase Dick Winters. He stopped loving me._

Jesus Christ. “Have you read this?” he demanded.

“No, sir,” Webster said. If he was a liar, he was a good one.

“So where did you get this?”

Webster winced. “I may have broken into a clinic,” he said. “I’ve never done anything like this before. But it didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem ethical—”

“You’re telling me a very long story that’s starting in the wrong place,” Lew said. “Come on.”

Webster drew in a breath. “You know Joe Liebgott, right, sir?”

“Yeah. Sure I do. Hated the Krauts, did his best to kill them all himself. What about him?”

“After the war,” Webster said, “he got his memories erased. There’s a clinic, Kruczynski Inc, that’ll do the whole thing for you. You can tell them what you want them to erase from your head, and they’ll do it. They have a few branches over the country, but this one was the nearest to me, so I thought I’d tackle it first. Did you know I’m a writer, sir?”

It didn’t sound unfamiliar, but Lew didn’t particularly want to make Webster aware that he’d retained any information about him. “No,” he said. “What’s your point?”

Webster sighed. “I guess I just think that our stories are important. They make up who we are, for good or for bad.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little corny, Private?” Lew asked.

Webster set his jaw. “Doesn’t stop it being true, sir. And Joe did some incredible things during the war. Saved lives. Saved my life, although I guess more emotionally than physically. He deserves to remember that. There are ways to deal with your problems other than erasing them entirely. I think everyone deserves to know the truth about themselves. So.” He nodded at the letter in Lew’s hands. “That’s your truth. I gave Major Winters his, too, and a few other people around this area. And now I have to go – I have a train to catch.”

“San Francisco?” Lew asked, and there was something helplessly vulnerable on Webster’s face for a second as he nodded before looking down at the ground. Then he turned and walked away, hands in his pockets, before getting in a car a little way down the street. Lew watched as he left, and then, as the road stilled, he felt himself shiver. It was so empty out here, but at the same time he felt as though he was being looked at relentlessly, maybe by the sky. He turned, and he went inside.

*

He poured himself a drink first, and added half an inch of water to it as a goodwill gesture. Then he sat down at his kitchen counter and spread the pages of the letter out in front of him. It was absolutely his handwriting, there was nothing to debate about that. But the words themselves made no sense. He thought back to what Webster had said: there was a clinic out there that could erase memories – and these were the memories that Lew had erased. Could it be true? And Dick had done the same thing, maybe, for reasons that made Lew want to go up to bed and sleep forever.

The letter. He needed to take a real look at it. _My name is Lewis Nixon and I want to erase Dick Winters. He stopped loving me._ He thought of Dick’s calm blue eyes and his small smile. _He wanted to demonstrate all the time that he was a better person than me._ Lew hadn’t seen that once, not a single time, in the hours he’d spent with Dick over that morning and the previous day. He read on. He’d thought that Dick was boring and arrogant, apparently, which was odd because they were two of the last words that he’d use to describe the man he’d shared a bed with last night. Dick wasn’t arrogant. He didn’t carry himself like he thought he was better than anyone else, and he certainly wasn’t boring. It sounded as though he didn’t like nightclubs and he didn’t drink, but that didn’t make him boring. He’d been easy to talk to, anyway, and Lew had found himself fascinated and entirely charmed by everything he said. 

There was more. Lew read on. They had spent all the years since the war living together, apparently – he cast an eye around his kitchen and imagined Dick in it, making coffee and dinner and pancakes on special occasions. They had moved to the country because Dick hadn’t liked Nixon all that much, which made an odd sort of sense because Lew wasn’t certain that he would have chosen this house under his own steam. It felt as though something had clicked into place there. 

_He wanted to save me._ That was on the paper too. If that was true, it had certainly been a hopeless challenge. There was a hell of a lot in the letter, as it happened, and he found out that he had hated Dick’s family, that they’d hated him right back, that they barely went to bed together any more (why not? the previous night had been incredible, and the morning too), that he felt horrible for forcing Dick to take a job he hated in a town he didn’t care for, that Dick refused to admit how much he hated the job and town, and Lew was furious about it. He was furious about a lot of things, it looked like, although it also seemed that perhaps he’d been most furious that Dick had gone to the clinic and erased him first.

He needed air. He took his glass and walked out to the back yard. It felt like rain was coming; maybe it was for the best that he and Dick hadn’t taken that walk after all. He sat down in one of the lawn chairs, but the leg was wobbling and uncertain, so he shifted around to wedge it deeper in the dirt. From beneath it, there was a cracking noise.

“What the…” He put his glass down carefully and stood, shifting the chair over. The dirt was uneven beneath it and he saw something that looked like fabric poking out from the earth. He scrabbled to pull it out and found an old oilskin wrapped around something rectangular. When he unwrapped it, the first thing he saw was shards of broken glass – the result of the cracking noise, evidently – lying on top of a framed photograph. Smiling up at him was his own face, and Dick’s beside him. They were wearing their PT clothes, and – where was that? He looked at it more closely. Was that Toccoa? Even back then they’d known each other. Even back then they’d smiled like that alongside each other. 

He took the photograph back into the house, and carefully wrapped the broken glass in the old oilskin before throwing it away. Then he stood the photograph on the mantelpiece. That seemed right. It was as if it had come home. He scanned the letter one more time. There was so much in there, so much bile, so much unhappiness. How much had come from what Dick had done to him, and how much from himself, and how much from the years they had apparently spent together?

He blew out a breath, and folded the papers messily back together before pushing them into the pocket of his overcoat and striding back out to his car. As he started it, he realised that he’d left his drink outside in the backyard, and couldn’t remember the last time he hadn’t finished what was in his glass. Then again, there were a lot of things lately of which he apparently had no recollection at all.

As he drove, he thought back over the last few years. It was hazy, alarmingly so. He could remember a weight next to him in bed, but not a face or a name. He could remember eating homemade meals that he didn’t know how to make himself, but not who had cooked them. He remembered not feeling alone, but not who had kept him company. And the army, too: he knew that he had spent some time with a woman called Irene in England, but there had always been some barrier there that had prevented him from going further than a little flirting with her, even though, thinking back, he was pretty certain that she would have been happy if their relationship had deepened. What had that barrier been? He had no idea, but if there had been someone else that whole time, someone whose presence he couldn’t quite remember, it made sense. He had barely any friends in Nixon, but he hadn’t made much of an attempt to socialise other than with his old friends in the city. If there had been a man at home with him, that could have been the reason for it.

But how could it have happened? How could someone like Dick become the man that Lew had written about? Someone stuffy, arrogant, superior, unpleasant, dull, uncaring? He thought of Dick’s pleasant, open face, and couldn’t square away those qualities with what he knew of him and what he had felt from him.

It was easy to find Dick’s place again, and even easier to pound on the door until an old lady came out of the downstairs apartment to open up and tell him off for causing a ‘ruckus’. Who even used the word ‘ruckus’? He half-smiled; it seemed like the sort of thing Dick might say. He took the stairs two at a time and when he reached Dick’s front door it was cracked open a couple of inches. 

“Hello?” He nudged it with his shoulder, and saw Dick sitting on the couch, looking flustered and surrounded by pieces of paper. 

“I thought it was you. I heard the knocking,” Dick explained, and gestured for Lew to close the door. He looked as though he was fraying at the seams, his face lacking a sort of certainty that Lew hadn’t quite realised was there before.

“Yeah. I think I gave the little old lady below you the fright of her life.”

Dick groaned. “She always bangs on her ceiling, no matter how quietly I try to walk.”

“Well then.” Lew let out a breath. “I guess we gave her the fright of her life last night instead.”

Dick hummed out a quiet laugh, but there was wariness in his face, like Lew was about to start yelling at him again. “Why’d you come back, Lew?” he asked then, quietly.

“I got this.” Lew pulled his own letter out of his pocket and handed it over to Dick, who held it as though it was a grenade with a faulty pin. “Remember Joseph Liebgott?”

“Sure, I remember Joe,” Dick said, and then his face crumpled. “My God. I got a note from him – or not from him, from—”

“Yeah. This erasing company.” Lew sighed. His body felt acutely heavier than it had this morning. He’d felt on top of the world, waking up beside Dick in his surprisingly comfortable bed, making out plus a little more under the hot spray of Dick’s shower. He sat down on the couch next to Dick. “Sounds like some bullshit, huh?” He leaned forward, rubbed his eyes, although it didn’t make him feel any better or make the world feel less bizarre and blurred. “But I guess it’s true, because I wrote all about you, too, and the reasons I wanted to never think about you again. And Webster, you know, the Harvard kid from Easy—”

“ _That_ kid,” Dick said, not sounding overly fond.

Lew laughed a little. “That kid. Yeah. Well, he was the one who delivered these letters. Broke in and stole them to send them out. I guess he thought what Liebgott did was fucked up. I guess he thought we all deserved our memories back.”

Dick surveyed the pieces of paper around him. “You know what, Lew, I could have gone the rest of my life not knowing what I wrote here. I didn’t realise I could be this person. So…”

“Mad?” Lew said, as Dick said: “Defeated.”

“Oh,” Lew said. 

Dick sighed. “This is good, though, in a way. I was starting to think I was going half-crazy. There were all these gaps in my memories, and it feels better to know that was where you were.”

“Even if I was destroying your life,” Lew said.

“You weren’t destroying my life,” Dick said, although he didn’t sound especially sure about it.

Lew glanced at the letters in Dick’s lap. “Can I…”

“Be my guest.” Dick gestured at the papers and Lew gathered them up carefully. “And I can…?” Dick was still looking at the letter that Lew had handed him as though there was a good chance it was lined with shit. 

“Go ahead,” Lew said, and together, at the same time, they began to read. Dick made a faint noise of surprise almost right away, and Lew forced himself to read more than he had before. _He’s so angry at the whole world that he wants to make everyone else angry too. His father’s a terrible man, and I think Lew’s going down the same road—_

“I’m not like my dad,” Lew muttered.

“I don’t think you are,” Dick said, a little desperately. “I’m sure you aren’t.”

“I don’t want to be like him. And I’m not. I don’t hit women, for starters.”

“You’d never do that. I know that,” Dick said. He reached out to touch Lew’s leg; he didn’t particularly feel like being touched right now, but he let it happen anyway. After a moment, Dick said, “You think I’m boring?”

“You’re not boring,” Lew said quickly. 

“I know I don’t drink, but I don’t think that makes me dull.” Dick was staring glassily at the paper. “Being comfortable with myself and knowing how I like to spend my time doesn’t make me boring, Lew.”

“I don’t think it does at all,” Lew said. On the page in front of him it says, _He goes to New York and stays there all weekend and I don’t hear from him at all. I think he’s probably been unfaithful to me._ “Dick, I wouldn’t ever cheat on you.”

Dick turned slowly to look at him. “We met eight years ago,” he said faintly. He looked very pale. “You have a son who’s five and a half, so I guess you were married when we first started...” He waved a hand to mean, _This_. “You used to be a cheat.”

“That doesn’t mean I’d do it again, damn it,” Lew mumbled, but of course there was no way he could prove it. He barely trusted himself anyway. He could have cheated on Dick. He couldn’t remember their relationship: he could have done a thousand terrible things to him. According to the letter, he had. But he couldn’t imagine having this man at home and wanting anyone else, no matter how bad it got between them. Cheating was the last straw. He knew he had been unfaithful to Kathy, but he couldn’t recollect any precise instances of it, couldn’t recall any other women or even any men. Maybe that was just Dick, there. Maybe Dick had been the only person he’d been unable to resist. 

Dick had returned his attention to his letter, and so Lew did too. Dick’s handwriting wasn’t great but he found himself able to understand it easily, just like he’d found it easy to go to bed with him, just like it had been easy to dance with him. His mind had forgotten, but his body hadn’t. His hands and his eyes still knew Dick by heart. Beside him, Dick made a faint pained noise and said, “You wrote that I looked at you like I hated you. Like I looked down on you.”

“Well,” Lew said. In front of him, Dick’s handwriting said, _He isn’t the man I first met. I don’t think he’s capable of loving anyone except himself. I don’t know if I’m capable of loving him anymore._ He looked at Dick, colder now. “Maybe you did.”

Dick made an impatient noise and leaned over Lew’s shoulder to see what he was reading. Then he wilted slightly. “Oh. You’re on that part.”

“Yeah,” Lew confirmed. “That part. Sure feels great, to know that’s what you thought of me.”

“And I’m the only one? I’m the only one to think shitty things? I was trying to help you, and you wouldn’t accept it,” Dick snapped.

Lew waved the handful of papers at him. “If you were looking at me like you hated my pathetic guts, of course I didn’t accept it!”

Something looked like it had broken on Dick’s face. “I don’t think you’re pathetic,” he said.

“Well, you sure as hell used to.” He couldn’t sit still for much longer. He couldn’t read these words. He couldn’t look into Dick’s eyes; no matter how guileless and frank his gaze was, it hadn’t always been like that. It seemed as though it had been a long time since they’d been happy together. The worst part of it all was that Lew still liked him for the day and the night that they had spent together, for the bright faces of those young men in the photograph that he’d found hidden in his back yard. Had he put it there himself? Maybe he hadn’t really wanted to forget.

He got up, moved into Dick’s kitchen. “There’s another bottle of beer in the fridge,” Dick said, sounding resigned, and Lew poured himself a glass of water to spite him. “My friend Harry visited last week,” Dick began, and Lew said, “Harry Welsh?” and Dick’s eyes widened, and Lew said, “God _damn_ it, Harry!” 

He drained his glass of water and went over to the army photograph over Dick’s fireplace, the lines of men standing side by side, some with serious faces, some stifling smiles. He knew these men. George Luz, who did impressions and made everyone laugh. Harry Welsh, grinning like there was a village somewhere who’d lost its idiot. There was Buck Compton, his blond hair gleaming. Damn it, there was Lip with the scar slashed across his face, Joe Toye and Bill Guarnere before they’d lost their legs, Don Malarkey, who loved Glenn Miller and had lost all his friends. “These were my men too,” he said, and turned around to Dick. “So you were there? D-Day?”

“All the way through to Zell Am See,” Dick said. “You?”

“Yeah. Me too. I carted home truckloads of booze from Goering's wine cellar in Germany.”

“I remember that cellar.” Dick’s mouth was set. “I showed it to you?”

Lew shrugged a shoulder. “How would I know? I guess you must have.”

“For Christ’s sake.” Dick was on his feet too now, with a flurry of paper cascading to the floor. “I gave you all that alcohol? When did you start drinking?”

Lew blinked at him. “I don’t know. I always did. When I was a kid, I think.” On his father’s knee, probably. He couldn’t remember not being a drinker. Drinking was one of the reasons he’d left Yale; or rather, the fact that he’d always found it difficult to stop drinking at the end of a night, which had meant that he’d missed a lot of mornings, or got through those mornings with another drink. Showing up to class reeking of whisky had not, in hindsight, given the best impression to his professors and fellow students.

“I knew you had a problem and I still did that,” Dick muttered, sounding like he was in a state of disbelief. He’d crossed to the window and was staring out of it. 

“It’s okay,” Lew said, not knowing quite why he felt the need to reassure Dick. “It was my problem. _Is_ my problem. Not yours.”

“It should have been both of our problems,” Dick said, eyes fixed on something in the distance. Then he turned to Lew. “If we do this again, it’s going to be my problem as well.”

“If we do this again?” He felt his heart leap at that. It felt like a miracle. Did he want this? Did he want this man? He looked across at Dick, his broad shoulders and his sure eyes and his unflinching mouth. He did, he realised; he wanted him more than anything else in the world.

“If you want to.” Dick rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “But I don’t know how to fix you, Lew. And I don’t know how to stop myself getting mad about that.”

Lew nodded slowly. That made sense. “What if,” he tried – it felt fragile between them, right now. It felt as though whatever they had built up over the last few minutes could easily be shattered again – “What if I worked hard, and fixed myself?” He was sick of being the person that he was. He didn’t like not being able to get out of bed in the morning. Being unhappy was exhausting and boring. It wasn’t as though it was something he had chosen: it had descended on him sometime, maybe even when he was a little kid, and he had spent part of his life fighting it, and the rest of his life failing to do so. He was tired of the life he had, of his empty house, of the body he was in that felt too skinny and too bloated at the same time and endlessly exhausted, of not knowing what to do with any of the love that was inside him. He didn’t know how to make himself into a truly happy person, but cutting down on drinking seemed to be a logical first step. And anyway, maybe ‘happy’ was a step too far for a lot of people, not just him. Maybe ‘content’ would be enough.

“You think you could?” Dick’s eyes flicked unconsciously to the letters, as though he doubted it. Lew could tell he wanted to believe, though, which was all he really needed.

“I don’t know. I hate it here, Dick. I hate this life, I hate my job—”

“So get a new job,” Dick said.

“What?” 

“Get a new job. We can go somewhere else,” Dick repeated calmly. 

Lew let out a shaky breath. Dick made it sound so simple, but it couldn’t be that easy. His father would lose his head. But did that matter? There was the money, but there were plenty of people in the world who worked for their money instead of taking it from their families. Dick was one of them, from the sounds of things, and anyway, Lew wouldn’t be entirely broke if he left. He had his mother’s money, and his paychecks had been partly invested wisely by someone who was not him, and he could sell his house, get somewhere smaller elsewhere. He could leave. They could both leave. There was a whole world out there; together, maybe they could strike out and find it.

He looked at Dick, at his open, honest face. _He thinks I’m pathetic. He stopped loving me._ Lew pushed those thoughts firmly out of his head and said, “All right.”

“All right?” Dick looked nervous.

“Yeah. All right.” Excitement was starting to eat at him; he risked a smile, and Dick smiled back at him, fleeting and lovely. “All right. Let’s do this.” He moved over to the couch and started to gather all the papers together into a pile, eyeing Dick’s fireplace. “Does that thing work?”

“Yeah,” Dick said, catching on right away and crossing the room towards it. It didn’t take long for the fire to catch and roar, and together they sat on the carpet, feeding their piles of papers into the flames. Lew caught words on the way, _respect, unfaithful, unhappy_ , and told himself to ignore them. 

Dick sat beside him, his face serious as he gazed into the fire. “Hey,” Lew said, nudging his shoulder gently. “We could still get dinner later.”

“Yeah.” Dick looked at him as though he’d woken from a bad dream, and smiled slowly as he reached out to stroke Lew’s hair back off his forehead. “Okay, Nix. That sounds good.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much to everyone who managed to get to the end of this! Any comments/feedback is so appreciated. you can also come and say hi over on [tumblr](https://scroungingabilities.tumblr.com/)!


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